MAR

“RISK IS SOMETHING
I KIND OF LIKE”

MIUCCIA
PRADA
& 35 WOMEN DRESSING WOMEN
PLUS: SPRING CULTURE PREVIEW!
JEREMY STRONG, TAYLOR RUSSELL, KINGSLEY BEN-ADIR,
LASHANA LYNCH, ANNE HATHAWAY, AND MORE
D I O R B O U T I Q U E S 8 0 0 .9 2 9. D I O R ( 3 4 67 ) D I O R . C O M
D I O R B O U T I Q U E S 8 0 0 .9 2 9. D I O R ( 3 4 67 ) D I O R . C O M
FENDI BOUTIQUES 888 291 0163 FEN D I .CO M
 March 2024

80 124
Editor’s Letter Home Grown
Fanciful work by
96 ceramist Toni De
Masthead Jesus conceals
a personal message
98
Contributors 132
Live to Tell
102 The powerful,
Up Front engrossing
As the Sudanese documentary High &
war threatens to spill Low: John Galliano
beyond its borders, sees the designer
can activist Niemat tell the story of his
Ahmadi help force life. By Maya Singer
an international
reckoning? 137
By Alexis Okeowo The Custom
of the Country
108 A new exhibition
The Thrill of traces how a love
the Chase of nature grew
Looking for that in Beatrix Potter
rarer-than-rare
vintage McQueen 138
or Marc Jacobs? Quick Change
José Criales-Unzueta The promise of
tracks down the color-adaptive beauty
new wave of products? Your
vintage hunters most flattering shade
is just a chemical
115 reaction away
Live at the
Apollo 142
Grammy nominee The End of Glitter?
Omar Apollo is Or are we just at the
coming into his own beginning—of a new
era of microplastic-
118 free, perfectly-
Scent Symphony healthy-to-eat (!)
The latest mash-up: sparkle. Tamar Adler
Cartier x Scriabin. reports on glitz
Chloe Schama to feel good about

FASH I ON ED I TO R: E RI C Mc N EA L. H A I R, NA I ’VAS HA ; MA KEU P, JESSI CA S M A LLS.

investigates the
ever-expanding 148
fusion of live music On His Terms
and fragrance With leading-man

P RO DUC ED BY CA N VAS P RODUCT I O N. SE T D ESI G N : V I KI RU TSC H.

roles on screen and
120 stage, the cerebral,
Red Hot highly disciplined
Found in fashion actor Tobias Menzies
and beauty every is stepping (carefully)
single season, a into the spotlight.
red lip has singular By Sarah Crompton
staying power
152
122 Tangier Dreams
What Is It With the A fleet of new cultural
Price of Clothes? hubs and hotels
Are you reeling means the storied
from sticker shock North African city
in a way that has never been more
seems new? Emilia inspiring to visit
GILDING THE LILY Petrarca is here
ACTOR LASHANA LYNCH IN A FERRAGAMO TOP AND SKIRT. to tell you that
PHOTOGRAPHED BY NORMAN JEAN ROY. you’re not alone C O N T I N U E D >7 2

52 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM

Bold Evolution 2.0 Ceramic

A SINGLE DOT MARKS THE SPOT

SWISS MADE SINCE 1881
swarovski.com
KHAITE
MCMWORLDWIDE.COM
INTRODUCING THE FIRST CARA DELEVINGNE
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 March 2024

P RO DUC ED BY S EL ECT S ERV I C ES. P HOTO G RA P HE D AT ES MÉ M IA M I BE AC H H OTE L. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.

ALL FOR FUN
FROM LEFT: MODEL DEVYN GARCIA (IN JW ANDERSON) WITH SISTER RIVER COVALT (IN ARITZIA AND THE ELDER
STATESMAN) AND MOTHER JENNIE PICKENS (IN MICHAEL KORS COLLECTION). PHOTOGRAPHED BY THEO LIU.

154 designers whose of a major installation make waves. gives a few of 258

FASH I ON ED I TO R: JO RD E N BI C KH A M. H A I R, CH A RLI E L E MI NDU; MA K EU P, E MI KA N EKO.

Storied Lands influence speaks at The Metropolitan By Gaby Wood them a real-world The Get
A range of for itself Museum of Art stress test Whether based
backdrops provide 230 in Colombia
the grounding for 210 220 Night Shift 250 or Denmark, the
spring’s best fiction History Lessons Catch a Fire Spring runways Island Time US or Ukraine,
In the new stage Painstaking offered a lighter, At home in Miami today’s talented
170 adaptation of preparation, and a brighter vision for Beach, model Devyn female designers
Mrs. Prada Henrik Ibsen’s An dose of actorly formal dressing— Garcia, her mom, know no
Almost everyone Enemy of the People, alchemy, transformed one hinged on daring and her darling little bounds—or
refers to Miuccia Prada Jeremy Strong Kingsley Ben-Adir silhouettes, lots of sister dive headfirst borders
in the most formal of sees the shadows into a reggae icon embellishments, into the season’s
ways, but she doesn’t of current crises. for the film Bob and a joie de vivre sunniest separates 264
stand on ceremony. By Maya Singer Marley: One Love. that rejects the Last Look
Wendell Steavenson By Marley Marius stuffy and stilted
meets a designer who 214
has built an empire in The Menagerie 224 238 Cover Look La Belle Époque
her own image: iconic, A childhood in Family Ties Maximum Miuccia Prada wears a vintage look from her
iconoclastic—and war-torn Kosovo led At the end of her Capacity debut fall 1988 collection. To get this look,
enormously influential Petrit Halilaj to make first year as Dior Long a source of try: Face Serum, Augmented Skin Cream,
some of the most CEO, Delphine quiet shame, the Reveal Skin Optimizing Refillable Foundation,
182 exuberant, playful Arnault is proving big, messy bag has Monochrome Hyper Matte Lipstick in B02
Strength in contemporary art to be a powerful been reclaimed as Quartz, and Universal Lip Balm. All by Prada
Numbers around. Dodie protector of a marker of modern Beauty. Details, see In This Issue.
Vogue celebrates a Kazanjian meets the legacy—and a womanhood. Photographer: Stef Mitchell.
global cast of female optimist on the brink leader poised to Emily Ratajkowski Fashion Editor: Alex Harrington.

72 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM

EAU DE PARFUM
MACY’S CHANEL .COM
SHOP THE BEST
OF THE SEASON

VOGUE.COM/SHOPPING
Letter From the Editor
Excellent Women
YOU WOULD NOT THINK, WHEN it comes to Miuccia Prada,
that there is still such capacity for surprise. But in Milan for the
ready-to-wear shows last fall, we were struck and amazed all over
again by the vibrancy and intelligence of what we were seeing at
Prada and at Miu Miu. With Prada this is, of course, down to
Miuccia and her creative partner, Raf Simons. Never have I known
two similarly immense design talents who have achieved such a
rare and intensely mutual collaboration.
But when I and the other editors considered the quality that
extends between both houses—so restless and modern at Prada, so
playful and pugnacious at Miu Miu—it was Miuccia’s creativity,
brilliance, and confident spirit that dominated the mind. At 74,
Miuccia has simply never been more relevant—a designer with the
towering stature of a head of state, and the ever-renewing intellect
of a star undergraduate.
I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking of her as something more too:
a role model. For here is a woman making clothes for women—a
designer whose understanding of how women actually live their
lives drives her work. When it comes to fashion, reality is first and
foremost; her clothes reveal a clarity of thought. They are not
extreme. “I try to respect women,” she said to the writer Wendell
Steavenson, who traveled to Venice and Milan to interview her
for our cover profile this month.
It would be a wide-ranging conversation. My own talks with
Miuccia rarely land on fashion. We talk about art. We talk about
politics. We talk about our families. She is catholic in her interests,
80 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM
UNITED FRONT
CLOCKWISE FROM FAR LEFT:
ANNA WINTOUR AND MIUCCIA
PRADA IN MILAN IN 2019;
STELLA MCCARTNEY AND
PHOEBE PHILO IN 1997; SARAH
BURTON, PHOTOGRAPHED
BY MIKAEL JANSSON, VOGUE,
MARCH 2017.
delightfully unpretentious,
and gently impatient by
nature. As much as she
loves art and culture, she’s
not content to simply
consume and support it; she
wants to create culture—
which she has done brilliantly with the Prada Foundation in Venice
and in Milan, two sites of art exhibitions, concerts, cinema screenings,
lectures, symposia, and more. The foundation’s home in Milan,
designed by architect Rem Koolhaas’s firm OMA, has transformed
that city into nothing less than a cultural hub and art world
destination. “Fashion is one third of my life,” she says, which is both
true and utterly remarkable given that she leads a fashion company
with $4.5 billion in annual revenue.
We are devoting a large part of our issue this month to women
designers. You may have noticed that there have been quite a few
creative directorships going to men recently. Good for them—new
faces are cause for excitement, irrespective of gender. But we
couldn’t help but want to celebrate the fact that women designers
still comprise a vital sorority in our industry—of new thinking,
creativity, mutual respect, and, in many cases, genuine friendship.
TO P LE FT: COU RT ESY O F D E RE K B LAS B ERG. TO P RI G HT: PA I M AG ES/G E T TY IM AGES.
Take Phoebe Philo and Stella McCartney, who’ve known each
other since they were students at Central Saint Martins—they’re
peers and friends, both. The same could be said of Emily Adams
Bode Aujla and Aurora James and Rachel Scott—and many more
who are celebrated in the pages that follow.
Women dressing women—a simple idea and a powerful one too.
And let me say that it wasn’t just Miuccia Prada’s work that made
me think of it this fall. Sarah Burton’s finale as the creative director
at Alexander McQueen was simply amazing—bold, provocative,
feminist, beautiful. After a quarter century at the British house,
Burton had nothing left to prove—and yet this collection sent her off
into her next chapter on a tide of adoration and acclaim. Whatever she
chooses to do next, women all over the world will be cheering her on.

Global Editorial Director
Global Network Lead & US Deputy Editor TAYLOR ANTRIM Global Head of Fashion Network VIRGINIA SMITH
Creative Editorial Director MARK GUIDUCCI Global Editor at Large HAMISH BOWLES
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96 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM
ANNA WINTOUR
SOCIAL
Senior Director, Creative Development and Programming,
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EVENTS/EXPERIENCES
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VOGUE GLOBAL
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KARLA MARTÍNEZ DE SALAS
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Associate APAC (Taiwan, India, Japan) Content Operations Director VAV LIN
 JENNIFER LAWRENCE

MINI
DOLCEVITA
 Contributors

Miami Nice
“Island Time” (page 250) sent photographer
Theo Liu and Vogue contributing fashion editor

BOTTOM : P E T RI T HA LI LA J. PA LACI O D E CRI STA L . MUSEO REI NA SO FÍ A . 2020. P HOTO: ALEX MOLTÓ BOR R EGUERO, ALEJAND RO. D ETAILS, SEE IN TH IS ISSUE.
Jorden Bickham down to Miami Beach, where

TO P LE FT: YU KI N O MO OR E. TO P RI G HT: P HOTO G RA P H ED BY ST E F M I TCHE LL . FASH I O N ED ITOR : ALEX H AR R INGTON, PRODUCED BY KITTEN PRODUCTION.
they shot model (and hometown hero) Devyn
Garcia—seen at center, in Marni—with her Mad About Miuccia
younger sister, River (left), and their model This month’s cover story, simply titled “Mrs. Prada” (page 170), had writer
turned firefighter mom, Jennie (right). (Although Wendell Steavenson meet the inimitable Miuccia Prada in Venice and Milan.
she posed for other Vogues during her career, Their conversation is paired with a portfolio, shot by Stef Mitchell and styled
this story marks Jennie’s US debut.) Together, by contributing editor Alex Harrington, in which Gigi Hadid wears 19 different
the crew cavorted on the beach, stopped in Prada and Miu Miu looks, dating from the late 1990s to spring 2024. (The
to the shops on Washington Avenue, and had selections, made by Vogue’s sittings editors, were the result of fierce debate.) But so,
a seafood feast at Joe’s Stone Crab, a local too, did the cover star dip into her archives: Encouraged only to “wear something
mainstay—enjoying just another day in paradise. bright,” Mrs. Prada picked a scarlet coat from fall 1988—her very first collection.

Sky Glow
In “The Menagerie” (page 214), Vogue contributing editor Dodie Kazanjian
profiles Petrit Halilaj, the Kosovar visual artist known for his irreverent
drawings, sculptures, and installations reckoning with war, displacement,
identity, and freedom. (When Halilaj was 13, Serbian troops forced him and
his family from their home in the former Yugoslavia, sending them some
70 miles southwest to Albania.) This April he will debut new work in The
Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, a
project about which he and The Met’s director, Max Hollein, for now remain
mum. Expectations, however, are sky-high; as Hollein tells Kazanjian,
Halilaj “gives you a very emotional and individual experience, and through
his art, makes it something that a whole generation can relate to.”

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98 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM

Up Front

Sounding the Alarm

As the Sudanese war threatens to spill beyond
its borders, can activist Niemat Ahmadi help force an
international reckoning? By Alexis Okeowo.

T
he videos keep coming: armed fighters taunting
men with their hands tied behind their backs,
bodies piled in an open grave. The videos are from
Sudan, where two generals began a struggle for
power last spring that has killed more than 12,000
people, displaced 6.6 million, and turned the
nation into a battlefield, one that has flooded social media with
images and videos that give the impression of a country burning
alive. The Washington, DC–based Sudanese women’s rights
activist Niemat Ahmadi can’t stop watching the footage. Nor can
her friend and fellow activist Sadya Eisa Dahab. “Shooting and
burning, people running for their life,” said Ahmadi when
I visited her at home on a recent winter day. “It’s shocking.” Trees
shook in the wind outside, but Ahmadi’s two-story house in the
Northeast district of Washington was warm and smelled of
incense; candles were lit on almost every surface on the first floor,
which felt like a smoky tea room in Khartoum.
For Ahmadi, 53, who has thick, dark hair, almond-shaped eyes,
and a restless but patient energy, the videos bring back memories
of the 2003 genocide she eventually fled in Darfur. It was
when she arrived safely in the US that she formed the Darfur
Women Action Group (DWAG), her nonprofit that works to
raise awareness of violence in Sudan. Over the past 15 years, the
group has lobbied Congress and held conferences on genocide
with high-profile attendees from the US State Department and
the UN, as well as foreign diplomats and the prosecutor for the
International Criminal Court (ICC). “In many instances people
view women as victims, but they fail to see their leadership and
courage and what they do to contribute,” she told me.
The challenge for Ahmadi’s organization now is desperate.
Two decades ago, the Darfur genocide became a cause célèbre.
Today, as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza dominate headlines, the
conflict in Sudan receives little attention from the international
community. “Maybe they are fed up,” said Dahab, who recently
helped her daughter and 11-year-old granddaughter flee the
violence in Sudan. “The fight is not from outside. It is among the
two generals, and they made agreements and cease-fires and
truces—and then broke them 24 hours later. Even all the >1 0 4
HOME FRONT
THE WAR IN SUDAN, OVERLOOKED BY MANY, HAS BECOME A
HUMANITARIAN CRISIS. SUDANESE PHOTOGRAPHER AND FILMMAKER
HASSAN KAMIL CAPTURES LIFE ON THE GROUND.

102 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM

* The alchemy of senses
Up Front Conflict in Sudan
international NGOs who are working in Sudan, they left.” After
a coup in 2021, a council of generals had run Sudan, until Abdel
Fattah al-Burhan of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and
Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, leader of the Rapid Support Forces
(RSF) paramilitary, started vying for power.
Neither general has fought humanely. “There’s no good or bad
armed side,” Kholood Khair, founding director of the Sudanese
research group Confluence Advisory, says. “But this war is one that
is being waged on civilians. And they would be ‘the good guy.’”
Ahmadi wants to focus attention on the catastrophic bombings of
residential neighborhoods and markets, the looting of homes
and businesses, the rampant killings and sexual violence—so that
Sudanese people don’t “die in silence,” she said. This is what she’s
good at, says Gregory Stanton, a former State Department official
and founder of Genocide Watch. “She’s a powerhouse. Her group
is the best at getting the word out. I would follow Niemat wherever
she would lead me.”
A
hmadi grew up in a part of Darfur called
Kabkabiya with six brothers and six sisters, and
a large extended family
of aunts and uncles close
by. Most of her neighbors
were farmers, growing
cash crops like grain, and Ahmadi’s parents
did the same. Ahmadi loved to pick
tomatoes and cucumbers with her brothers
when she wasn’t in school. “We also had
gardens full of fruits and vegetables,” she
says. “My childhood was: come home from
school, throw down your bag, and run
to the gardens. Sometimes we’d pretend
we were going to study, and we’d climb
a mango tree, singing and reciting some of
our favorite subjects,” Ahmadi recalls,
like Arabic-language poetry. Early on she
wanted to be an artist but ultimately
decided to study psychology and preschool RAISING THE STAKES
NIEMAT AHMADI, FOUNDER OF THE DARFUR
education as an undergraduate in Khartoum. WOMEN ACTION GROUP, DEMONSTRATING IN
“I was the first among my sisters to go to WASHINGTON, DC, IN 2009.
college,” Ahmadi says with pride. “I wanted
to get as much education as I could. I wanted to do things.
I wanted to defy the norms of a woman who just gets married and
stays home—that idea that you only can be complete if you’re
married.” Her parents were supportive; her father especially urged
her to go to college. “I felt like I had to pay back when
I graduated,” she says.
That meant working for international relief organizations in
Darfur, the vast western region of Sudan where, by late 2002, she
and her colleagues were seeing signs of a coming crisis. Ethnic Arab
nomadic herders, as part of the government-backed Janjaweed
militia, had begun attacking Indigenous African farming villages
near her town and assassinating businessmen and local leaders.
The violence continued when she returned to Khartoum to earn
her master’s in sustainable development. “I would be in class
and my family would call me,” she remembers, “and I’d hear the
sounds of guns and shooting. It was terrifying.” Ahmadi soon
began documenting atrocities firsthand, memorizing dozens of
104 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM
names of victims of the Janjaweed, since paper records could be
confiscated at government checkpoints. She took photos of
victims and of their burned homes and villages and met with aid
groups. It all helped: A massive advocacy movement began taking
hold around the world.
She remembers being excited by how effective her work
was. “I would send information to people in the US and they
would go protest,” Ahmadi recalls. Stanton says that when he
first met her, “she was already a major leader in the Save Darfur
movement. It was Niemat who really made it into a movement
that included Darfuris. Before that, it was a collection of people
who were mostly Europeans and Americans. Niemat was a
huge inspiration to everybody.” But she was threatened as she
traveled around Sudan, and in early 2005, she had to flee to
Kenya for her safety. “I was devastated to leave. I felt guilty,” she
says. In Kenya she applied to a Columbia University fellowship
through the Ford Motor Company—and won it. She decided to
make the US her home, where she’d apply for asylum after her
fellowship ended. Her pain at leaving Darfur drove her to action.
“I wanted to do everything possible. I started speaking. I think
between 2007 and 2008, I traveled to 23
states.” She met with then president
George W. Bush, whose administration
facilitated aid to Darfur and gave
support to the UN deployment. By
2009, she’d founded DWAG.
While Ahmadi struggled to get word out
of the violence in Darfur in the early
2000s, evidence of the current conflict is
everywhere. “There’s a TikTok of a
genocide basically in slow motion,” says
William Carter, Sudan country director
for the Norwegian Refugee Council
in Sudan, a humanitarian organization.
“The scale of what’s happening in
Sudan—we’re talking about famines and
ethnic cleansing and state collapse—is
so serious that it will probably spill into
the whole region, over the borders if
it’s not tackled more assertively.” In early
December, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken released a
statement acknowledging “war crimes” in Sudan and calling the
RSF’s and SAF’s actions in Darfur “ethnic cleansing.” But the
statement has done nothing to prevent the RSF, which evolved
from the Janjaweed, from their targeted purging of thousands
of people in Darfur. “We have a government that does not think
the people of Darfur are worth saving,” Stanton says.
And women and girls have suffered much of the current
violence, especially by the RSF, which is systematically abducting
CH I P SO MO D EV I LLA /G ET T Y I M AG ES.
and raping residents in both Darfur and Khartoum. “So
regardless of where you are in Sudan, women are the currency
in a marketplace that is transacted through violence,” Khair,
the policy analyst, tells me. The rival military factions are also
targeting human rights activists, journalists, doctors, and other
politically active, pro-democracy figures in an effort to eliminate
dissent, though neither force is likely to be able to rule the
country in the near future. >1 0 6
Up Front Conflict in Sudan
Khair describes conditions in the capital as especially dire.
“Khartoum is completely gone,” she says. And because the city has
no green zones or safe routes, no international humanitarian
assistance has been able to get in. Doctors Without Borders has
been working at a few hospitals but is running out of surgical
supplies, and Khartoum residents have set up what are essentially
soup kitchens. The SAF and the RSF have tried to seize much
of the aid in the rest of Sudan for their soldiers, and more than
20 million people are facing extreme hunger, according to the
World Food Program. “Some of the worst things in the world are
happening in Sudan right
now, but it’s going on basically
unnoticed,” Carter says.
“What I hear when I speak
to diplomats, when I speak to
senior policy folks, is that they
say, ‘Oh, well, you know how
everyone’s concerned about
Ukraine, everyone’s concerned
about Gaza,’ ” Khair says.
“And I just think, Well, you
can care about more than
one conflict at a time.” If the
generals are allowed to
continue their fight, it is likely
the violence will spill over
into neighboring countries
in the region. Already the
United Arab Emirates has
been accused of moving
weapons and drones to the A LANDSCAPE OUTSIDE THE CITY OF KADUGLI IN SUDAN.
PHOTO BY HASSAN KAMIL.
RSF, which it denies, while
supposedly trying to broker a
peace agreement. Meanwhile, Egypt and Iran are supporting the
SAF. Khair fears the war could last for years to come.
A
hmadi says she does not feel consumed by her work,
partly because it feels like a calling, and partly
because of the people she meets along the way. In
September she spoke with Amal Clooney at a
panel during the UN General Assembly. “All of
you who have been following Sudan will know
of her fantastic work,” Clooney said at the panel of Ahmadi, who
sat serenely in a salmon pink blazer and big hoop earrings. Ahmadi told her she supported what Ahmadi had done with her life and
had, in fact, rushed to the UN from a delayed train. “I never
wished to live to see this,” Ahmadi told the room. “People killed,
slaughtered, recorded and broadcasted live…. Sudan needs an
atrocity prevention approach that will prioritize accountability for
those who are responsible. We appeal to ordinary citizens and
those of you who are policy makers. Be the voice of the people of
Darfur who have been silenced.”
Clooney met Ahmadi in 2021 when Clooney represented victims dishes and listen to a musician from their region.
of the Darfur genocide at the ICC in The Hague. “Niemat
was a great ally on the case,” Clooney says. “She is a formidable
advocate for the rights of women and children: the forgotten
victims of a forgotten war. At a time when the UN Security
Council is deadlocked and the world is distracted, voices like
Niemat’s are essential—she shames us all into doing more.”
106 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM
Weeks after the panel, Ahmadi spoke before the Security
Council on the pervasiveness of sexual violence in Darfur. “The
vicious war that erupted on April 15 in Sudan has been largely
fought, sadly, over women’s bodies,” she said. “And I don’t think
this is news to this Council.” Then, in December, Ahmadi and
a small delegation of her fellow activists arrived again in New York
for a conference among the member states of the ICC—which
has opened an investigation into war crimes in Sudan. She wants
the international community, ideally with the African Union
at the lead and with pressure from the United States, to intervene
to protect civilians and open
a humanitarian corridor for the
delivery of aid. But President
Biden has said nothing
so far about Sudan. (Though
the US Department of the
Treasury has imposed sanctions
on the properties and entities
of one Sudanese paramilitary
leader and three former senior
officials, along with those
of four companies associated
with both generals.) The
African Union also has done
little beyond suspending
Sudan and calling for a
cease-fire. DWAG’s strategy
now is to mobilize the
Sudanese diaspora to push
HILLTOP VIEW
their congresspeople; they
have a letter campaign for
elected officials and newspaper
op-ed sections. “The crisis
in Sudan, the reason it has been going on so long,” Ahmadi says,
“is because of impunity. I do think if there is accountability, that
will be a deterrent.”
Ahmadi went home to Darfur in 2021 after 16 years away. Her
voice becomes soft when she talks about her trip. “It was emotional,
and it was hard, and it was beautiful at the same time,” she tells
me. “You see the level of destruction. Every single home has lost
multiple people.” But people were generous, bringing gifts to her
mother’s home. “I broke all my rules,” Ahmadi says, laughing.
“I’m not a dessert person, but I ate all kinds of desserts.” Her mother
that she admired the way Ahmadi had helped the family, bringing
two nieces and a nephew to the US from Sudan for school. They
still live near her, in the DC area. “So I have created a small family
here,” she says. She tells me that most of her time is spent working,
but she does cook for friends and dance—“Put on my music and
make my own party,” she says—and see the Darfuri community in
Richmond, Virginia, where they recently gathered to eat Sudanese
The Sudanese people, surviving on the ground, are what keep
her and other activists inspired. “What’s amazing is the way women
and young people step up, at the risk of their own lives. While the
bombing is happening, they’re feeding the wounded. They’re taking
people to hospitals,” Ahmadi says. “We’ve been left to fend for
ourselves, but we are also showing that we can do it for ourselves.” *

The Thrill of the
Chase
Looking for that rarer-than-rare vintage
McQueen or Marc Jacobs?
José Criales-Unzueta tracks down the
new wave of vintage hunters.
A
s I join a video call with Johnny Valencia, the founder of
Pechuga Vintage, I notice his attention split between two
screens: his phone’s, where he’s talking to me from Los
Angeles, and his computer’s, where he’s scrutinizing an
online auction of Mouna Ayoub’s Chanel by Karl Lagerfeld collec-
tion. The French Lebanese socialite is doing away with 252 pieces
from her substantial haute couture archive, and Valencia is eyeing
the magnificent black silk crepe gown from Chanel’s 1992 couture
collection that Christy Turlington first wore on the runway, and that
Lily-Rose Depp reintroduced at the 2019 Met Gala.
“I like to see myself as a vessel for transitory beauty,” says Valencia
with a laugh. The vintage dealer, who started his business officially
in 2018 after years of amateur thrifting amid a career in the buying
108 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM
team at Vivienne Westwood, is part of a new generation of fiercely
proactive hunters whom fashion fanatics around the world enlist
to find the buzziest and most highly sought-after vintage of the
moment. That one archive Chanel fall 1991 belt that Linda Evange-
lista wore on the runway? Valencia’s got it. The elusive Marc Jacobs
Kiki boots? Doja Cat bought them from his shop.
Of course, you didn’t always need a bespoke hunter to find good
vintage, but the culture around archival fashion has pushed the mar-
ket to a new frontier replete with its own trend cycle, must-haves, and
hype products. The days of casually strolling into a consignment shop
on Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to find an
affordable Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche jacket? They’re long over.
Today’s vintage enthusiasts aren’t hoping to be surprised by a great
find—they’re hunting to order and know exactly what they want.
“Now anybody can have fashion—that’s the new thing,” says styl-
ist turned curator Renée Howard. “It makes it less special. I know
that only a couple people in the world have the pieces I have from
years ago, and that’s what makes others want them.” Which only
makes her wardrobe—ranging from vintage Versace and John Galli-
ano to contemporary Schiaparelli—all the more prized. For Howard,
a longtime client of Valencia’s, this newfound fevered fascination
with rare vintage can largely be explained by noting that high fashion
used to be, for the most part, produced in limited quantities—so if
you have it, you know that practically no one else does. “That’s why
you don’t just get rid of fashion,” Howard says: Because the unsung
treasures of the past have become today’s grails.
Howard and Valencia first connected over Instagram when she
commented on one of his posts of John Galliano’s newsprint dress
for Christian Dior. “I have it, and I don’t think he believed me, so he
asked for a photo,” says Howard. And while she told Valencia that
she had no plans to sell the piece anytime soon—Galliano’s work,
both for his eponymous label and for Dior, is currently among the
rarest and most covetable vintage—they became fast friends and
soon started working together to curate her wardrobe.
There’s also the internet of it all. Over the past couple of years,
by way of Instagram fashion archives and the advent of TikTok
and Depop, vintage reselling has evolved from a niche pursuit to a
fully fledged industry. “Now it’s more name-driven than anything
else,” says Roberto Cowan of the Tucson-based Desert Vintage,
which he runs with Salima Boufelfel and which specializes in
increasingly fleeting period pieces and the cerebral designers of the
20th century—plus some Yves Saint Laurent. Clients today, though,
are becoming more and more specific with their requests—a West-
wood corset, a John Galliano bias-cut slip dress—which, these hunt-
ers argue, is deeply tied to what we see online.
“If it’s a piece you can link back to a runway image, it automat-
ically is worth tens of thousands of dollars,” says Cherie Balch of
P HOTOG RA P H ED BY ST EV EN M EI SE L, VO GU E, M A RCH 20 06.
the Canadian shop Shrimpton Couture, who is known for finding
the dreamiest and most fantastic of vintage couture dresses. (That
applies to non-runway pieces that have been documented on celeb-
rities too.) Still, if the original appeal of vintage was in finding and
wearing something no one else has, the 2024 tweak is that it should
also be something that people recognize—and therefore know how
hard it is to find. Vintage dealing has become a competitive sport.
“When you’ve been doing this for long enough, stuff makes its
way to you,” says Balch, who consistently and instinctively “pre-buys”
to stock her archive—a quality that proved essential when >1 1 0
PAINTING THE PICTURE
Models (from left) Sasha Pivovarova and Lily Donaldson in
John Galliano–era Dior, now highly sought-after, in 2006.
LAGOS.COM
 sourcing Chanel for her client Kiely MacLean’s wedding wardrobe.
MacLean had originally bought a light blue fall 1976 Chanel couture
dress from Balch—only to have the piece stolen when her car was
broken into weeks before her wedding. “She understood how special
all this was to me, and that I really wanted vintage Chanel,” says
MacLean, a CEO and entrepreneur in the environmental industry.
MacLean created a detailed mood-board-like document replete with
photos of pieces she loved from previous runways, which informed
Balch’s hunt through her archive. MacLean was thrilled to settle on
both a pink couture gown from the ’70s and a tiered iteration from
2013. “Cherie is like a fairy godmother,” she gushes.
Though Balch’s extensive archive sets her business apart, the pro-
cess of finding pieces is the same for any vintage hunter and requires
building an extensive network of dealers across different specialties:
designers, time periods, antiques. The bigger the Rolodex, the higher
the success rate of finding just the piece your client is looking for—
be that a prospective bride, a celebrity (or their stylist—Balch often
works with Samantha McMillen, who regularly dresses Elle Fanning
in vintage pieces from her collection), or a mere fashion obsessive.
The key, assuming one already knows their way around the right
auctions and estate sales, is to remain grounded—or, as Cowan puts
it, to not get “paddle-happy.”
“I can get excited and bid for something I don’t need, or that I
shouldn’t buy,” Cowan says. He and Boufelfel have learned, with
time, to remove themselves emotionally from the transaction. “You
need to practice some detachment,” Boufelfel says. They now bid
silently and leave before the actual action starts.
Daphne Javitch, a womenswear consultant

turned health coach who is a recurrent cus-
tomer at Desert Vintage, describes her ward-
robe as “98 percent vintage and 2 percent
The Row.” Her personal style, minimal and
uncomplicated, dovetails nicely with the sort
of pieces Cowan scouts and buys. “Roberto
is famous for having the most stamina to
hunt,” says Javitch. “He also manages to get
into the closets of ladies who have incredi-
ble vintage collections that seem to be out of
limits for everyone else.”
Equally as important as access, though, is
the ability to forecast where the vintage tide
will shift next. Howard recalls with some
awe how Valencia anticipated the wave
of interest in Thierry Mugler’s work circa
2021 as Casey Cadwallader’s own iteration
of the French house gained traction on pop
stars and celebrities. (Valencia hunted down
two Mugler pieces for Howard prior to the
designer’s 2022 passing—the famous Vampire dress from his fall
1981 collection and a pair of velvet shorts from Mugler’s fall 1991
Music-Hall lineup—both of which he found by scouring auc-
tions.) At the moment, Valencia is keeping an eye on pieces from
Halston and Stephen Sprouse, Boufelfel and Cowan think it’s high
time that Joan Vass and Ann Demeulemeester got their flowers,
and Balch hopes people dive into Emanuel Ungaro (still, she thinks
that the most underrated of them all is Marc Bohan and his work
at Christian Dior). All of the vintage hunters I spoke with, though,
agree that John Galliano’s work is currently among the most (if
not the most) sought-after. “For years, because of the controversy
around him, his items did not move at resale,” says Balch, “but his
talent is hard to ignore, as is the beauty of what he created—so
TO P : P HOTO G RA P HE D BY E LLE N VON UN W E RT H, VOGUE, O CTO BE R 19 9 1 . BOTTO M : P H OTOGRAPH ED BY STEVEN MEISEL, VO GU E , AUGUST 20 03.
OUT OF THE PAST
What vintage hunters are hunting now:
romantic Vivienne Westwood (left) and iconic
Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel (above).
now his work is insanely expensive—it’s just
so hot right now.”
There’s also the futures market to contend
with: Who are the designers working today
that vintage hunters will be chasing in 20
years? Jonathan Anderson is a name that
comes up, as is Schiaparelli’s Daniel Rose-
berry (Howard recently had Valencia hunt
down a pair of his sold-out golden-toe boots
for her). Sarah Burton’s work at Alexander
McQueen is already popular—and the fact
that she just left her post will only make
her runway collections more covetable, says
Balch. (McQueen is currently trending as a
whole—a new designer at the house, in this
case Seán McGirr, always ignites a newfound interest in its archive.
One of our hunters is looking for Lee McQueen’s original, infa-
mous “Bumster” trousers from the early ’90s, which were produced
in very limited quantities, making for a hard—but not impossible—
search. “You just have to know who to call,” says Valencia.)
The one question not to ask vintage hunters: What’s the next big
thing? “We don’t speak of it until it’s in our hands,” says Howard.
The thing about vintage is that the moment people start to talk
about it, it becomes a thing—and thus both harder to find and more
expensive to buy. The other thing about vintage? Longing is for-
ever, and the wheel keeps spinning. Valencia didn’t land that Chanel
dress that he was eyeing during our call—it sold to someone else for
$82,242—but not to worry: There’s always next time. *

110 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM

 Live at the Apollo
Grammy nominee Omar Apollo
is coming into his own.

like to go where things are uncom-

I fortable, or complex,” says Omar

Apollo. “Making music isn’t easy.
That’s why I’ve dedicated a lot of
my life to it.” It’s also why the 26-year-
old musician hasn’t taken much of a
break since releasing his debut album,
Ivory, in 2022. A lush blend of R&B
and hip-hop along with Latin trap
and Mexican corridos, Ivory revealed
Apollo’s chameleonic versatility and
earned the singer-songwriter his first
Grammy nomination for best new
artist. Not long after, he left his home
base of LA to open for SZA on the
North American leg of her arena SOS
tour. “It’s not my show, so I was kind
of scared of how the crowds would
react,” he says. But “seeing people’s
expressions, it’s huge.” In October,
Apollo released Live for Me, a sparse
and raw EP that was, in a way, an
exercise in further discomfort. (One of
the EP’s tracks, “Ice Slippin,” is about
the winter he came out to his family.)
“Those songs helped me find where
FASHION EDITOR: MAX ORTEGA. HAIR, LACY REDWAY; MAKEUP, HOLLY SILIUS USING YSL BEAUTY.

I was going,” he says. And this year,

PRODUCED BY FAMILY PROJECTS. SE T D ES I G N: O LI V I A GI LES. D E TA I LS, SE E I N T HI S I SSUE.

there is new music on the way.

The son of working-class Mexican
immigrants from Guadalajara, the
singer (born Omar Apolonio Velasco
in 1997) grew up in Hobart, Indiana,
where he first taught himself to play
the guitar. “Music gave me a feeling, a sparkle,” he says. After gaining
traction on SoundCloud, Apollo was signed to Artists Without A
Label in 2017 (he later switched to Warner), and quickly ensnared
in a cycle of releases and tours. “I wasn’t really thinking about it,” he
says, looking back. “My brain was just on autopilot.” He recorded
one whole version of Ivory, then scrapped it and started over. “I had
to discover myself,” he says.
That sense of clarity is crucial for Apollo, who values his instincts.
Last summer, that meant leaving LA for London, where he set up
shop in Little Venice, a quaint neighborhood named for its canals. “It
was a little too quiet,” he jokes. The neighbors slipped him notes out-
lining their objections to the volume of Apollo’s speakers. In between
recording, he’d invite friends on bike rides through its many parks.
Aside from the occasional noise complaint, the cloudy skies of
London—a contrast to sunny LA—suited him. Apollo says he has
always been drawn to subjects that are hard to grasp, rather than
those that feel concrete or bright. (He is clearly aware of wider
world issues: When we speak in early January, he’s just wrapped up
a benefit concert for humanitarian aid in Sudan and Gaza.) “I’ve
talked to my therapist about it, but I really like being in a different
place.” In this case, dislocation added perhaps an even greater force
to his new work. “I get kind of lost in the process of making music,”
he acknowledges. “I’m surfacing emotions, and I’m not zoomed out.
But later, I am like, Wow, I really wrote this from my soul. I felt this
really deeply.”— 
CUT UP
Born to Mexican parents who immigrated to Indiana,
Omar Apollo (in Commission) learned to play guitar on YouTube.
Photographed by Justin French.

VOGUE.COM MARCH 2024 115

 Scent Symphony
The latest mash-up: Cartier x Scriabin.
Chloe Schama investigates
the ever-expanding fusion of live
music and fragrance.

n March of 1915, a crowd of fashionable patrons gathered for

I the New York premiere of Alexander Scriabin’s Prometheus: The

Poem of Fire. The Russian-born Scriabin had composed the piece
by means of what he called his “color hearing,” a synesthesia-
inspired interpretation of the correlation between notes and hues—
something the staging at Carnegie Hall was meant to reflect. “Over
the heads of the musicians stretches a gauze screen,” reported
one gushing contemporary account, “and across this screen play
many-colored lights, blending, sweeping onward in overpowering
beauty.” It was the first complete performance of the first com-
position arranged this way, notes musicologist James Baker, and a
culmination of the pianist and composer’s future-forward music.
Mere weeks later, the avant-garde visionary died, taken down by
a simple infection.
This month, more than a hundred years after that premiere, a
new iteration of Prometheus will unfold at Davies Symphony Hall
in San Francisco—one that involves not just color but scent as well,
with three distinct fragrances released at key moments throughout
the performance. The effect intends to create an all-encompassing
experience—and given that the myth of Prometheus describes noth-
ing less than the triumph of human ingenuity against the brute
forces of nature, a concert that seeks to elevate its patrons to another
plane seems appropriate.
“We are, I would say, sensorial people,” says Cartier in-house per-
fumer Mathilde Laurent, who cooked up the project several years ago
with her good friends Esa-Pekka Salonen, San Francisco Symphony’s
music director, and pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. (Scent, says Thibau-
det, has always had a powerful sway over him: “I remember scent as
much as I remember pictures, situations, people,” he tells me.)
The combination of fragrance and performance is not new.
Plumes of incense have wafted around the organ pipes and through
the choir’s chancel in Catholic Church ceremonies for centuries,
while in the 19th century theaters sometimes distributed scented
or Smell-O-Vision, which debuted in 1959 and 1960). Other olfac-
tory interventions have sought to influence not how we receive art,
but how they might affect us physically: A nightclub scented with
orange, seawater, and peppermint, one Netherlands study found,
fosters more energy on the dance floor. In 2009, Green Aria: A
ScentOpera was performed at the Guggenheim, and last fall, the
Icelandic artist-run perfumery Fischersund teamed up with Jónsi,
the Sigur Rós frontman, for “A Night of Scent and Music” at Le
Poisson Rouge, the Manhattan experimental music space.
So many other of these multisensory adventures, however, have
been curtailed by practical realities. How, for instance, do you
sequence a series of scents—clearing out one before you release the
next? And of course it’s one thing to suffer through a dull perfor-
mance; imagine being trapped in a concert hall rapidly filling with a
scent you find unpleasant. Laurent, though—perhaps a bit more of a
mad scientist or poet than your typical in-house perfumer—is not one
to back off from a challenge. Calling from the Fondation Cartier in
Montparnasse, she describes a few of her experiments with olfactory
installations—a staircase that ascends through plumes of fragrance
within a glass box, for instance, to allow visitors to, as she put >1 2 0
G E TT Y I M AG ES.

fans to help with body odor issues. More recently, there have been
technology-driven experiments to combine scent with motion-
picture entertainment (think of the “scent tracks” of AromaRama
PLAY IT LOUD
Dropping the needle on fragrance in a concert hall is a complicated
tango involving perfumers, producers, and directors incorporating chemistry
and scent-distribution technology.

118 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM

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 SMELL TEST

H AIR , LACY R EDWAY; MA KEU P, YAD IM CARRAN ZA. PRO DUCE D BY VIEWFIN D E RS. D E TAILS, S E E IN T HIS ISSU E .
This month, San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall will feature fans

TOP: CRAIG MOLE/COURT ESY O F SAN FRAN CISCO SYMPHO N Y. BE LOW: FAS HIO N E D ITO R: MAX O RT EGA.
under each seat to distribute scent throughout the space.

Hall without preconceived aversions or predilections, and will only

it at the time, experience “the smell of the rain.” For the San Fran-
cisco Prometheus, the technology will involve dry diffusion, which
encapsulates the fragrances without water and uses fans underneath
each seat to intermittently distribute them. It’s hard to imagine when
most of us think of fragrance as something spritzed from a bottle
or emanating from a scented candle, but the technology, Laurent
says, “allows us to be very quick with the different smells—they can
appear and disappear.” (At a test in October, the trio fine-tuned their
approach, making sure the scents weren’t too overpowering.)
When it comes to the aromas themselves, Laurent is reluctant to
reveal much detail, preferring that people arrive at Davies Symphony
describe them in broad terms: “It’s storms; it’s chaos,” she says of
the first scent, which is associated with the earliest, dark iterations
of the Prometheus myth. “It’s the smell of dangerous nature.” (A
fragrance for a turbulent Monday morning commute?) The second
scent, timed to Prometheus’s offering of fire, comes from a preexist-
ing Cartier concoction, La Treizième Heure Eau de Parfum, a leath-
ery, woodsy scent that reminds me of winter nights, furs wrapped
around shoulders, dark skies punctuated by stars. The third relates
to a more joyful, creative time. Man is in a good place: “He is going
to be able to create beauty and to achieve the elevation of the soul,
of the mind, the intelligence,” says Laurent.
Apart from the Cartier fragrance that’s already on store shelves,
the other perfumes will never be bottled and sold in a store. And why
should they? It took more than a century to harness the personal
and technological chemistry to pull off a concert like this—if you
want to experience it, you will need to be in the hall (or hope for an
encore performance). “It’s important to show that things are made for
something,” Laurent tells me, “and that they are made very sincerely,
purely.” It’s all a part of the beauty of performance, says Thibaudet:
“It’s something you can truly only experience in person.” *

Red Hot
Found in fashion and beauty every single season,
a red lip has singular staying power.
ibrant red is the first color that beauty market this year—$4 billion to be

V a baby perceives after black and

white. Ancient Romans painted
their villas vermilion tones and
wove carnelian-colored threads into their
tunics. In Egypt, red clay adorned bodies
during celebratory moments. For Swiss psy-
chiatrist Carl Jung—not just the founder of
analytical psychology but a proponent of
the idea that we are all ruled by underly-
ing “color energies”—it represented both a
warning sign and passion.
There are, needless to say, innumerable
reasons a red lip persists. For the modern
woman—touring the world like Taylor
Swift, who reportedly wears Pat McGrath’s
LiquiLust Legendary Wear Matte Lipstick,
or walking the Golden Globes red carpet like
Rachel Brosnahan in a shade that matched
her gown and her hair ribbon—a crimson
pout elicits feelings of power. The models
on the catwalk with glossy-as-a-sports-car
lips at Gucci’s spring-summer runway show
certainly projected an assured capability.
Research has indicated that lipstick is
poised to take up an increased share of the
precise—with an array of tones ranging
from cranberry to tomato leading the way.
A third of Clé de Peau Beauté’s diamond-
and gold-infused lipsticks are shades of red
(the luxury ingredients purportedly help
with hydration, or at least a feeling of quiet
luxury). Dior’s new Rouge Dior collection
has 24 different shades; the brand’s creative
director, Peter Philips, shares that “many
women actually consider a red lip their
version of a nude.” The Rosso Valentino
Refillable Lipstick line starts its homage to
the shade with the ruby-lacquered tube, and
red shades come in two different finishes;
the makeup brand Hourglass burnishes its
vegan credentials with a carmine alternative
in the Red 0 formulas. The red lip may be as
classic as it comes, but there’s always room
for reinvention.— 
IN THE SHADE
Adut Akech wears Valentino Beauty,
Dolce & Gabbana jacket,
and Bulgari earrings. Photographed
by Campbell Addy.

120 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM

 New Technology, Endless Comfort
Devyn Garcia, Body by Victoria Invisible Lift Minimizer Bra & Body by Victoria Smoothing Shimmer Brief Panty
 What Is It With the Price
of Clothes?
Are you reeling from sticker shock in a way that seems new?
Emilia Petrarca is here to tell you that you’re not alone.

’m n o t s a y i n g t h a t I High-end brands have

I p r e d i c t e d l a s t ye a r ’s
inflation—but if you’re
as addicted to shopping
as I am, you probably saw
the writing on the wall too:
long been aware that a higher
price tag could actually make
an item even more desirable.
“Over the last couple of years,
we’ve found that higher price-
At least since the start of point items sell the best,” says
the pandemic, the prices of Sherri McMullen, founder
luxury goods seem to have of the McMullen boutique
sky roc keted f rom reall y in Oakland, which carries
expensive to really, really, quiet-luxur y brands like
really expensive—or f rom Khaite and The Row along
aspirationally splurge-able to with lesser-known design-
no-way-can-I-afford-that. ers and artisans. (Of course,
A few months ago I book- when you’re paying $10,000
marked a pair of designer for a bag, you’re probably not
leather boots in the hope shouting about it from the
that I could maybe budget rooftops, but then again, you
for them, only to find that by don’t need to: Such a piece
the end of the season they’d carries its own stealthy sig-
gone up by $200, not down— naling to a smaller and self-
for no apparent reason other selecting audience.)
than being in demand. When On the other hand, many
they finally went on sale, it shoppers find current prices
was at the price I’d first seen. to be almost offensively high.
(Needless to say, I still don’t “No one wants to feel like
own these boots.) they’re being duped,” says
“I started to be extra Malinsky, who finds herself
horrified about five years wondering: “Are these brands
ago,” says Becky Malinsky, just pushing the limit to see
a former newspaper editor how much I will spend?” As a
who now writes a popular personal shopper and stylist,
shopping newsletter. Prices, she sees clients rethinking
she noticed, seemed to have reached a sort of fever pitch. “I was like, their investments. “Even when funds are unlimited, there comes a
What is going on?” point where people are like, How many things do I want to buy when
There are myriad factors at play, but dramatic rises in the costs I could redo my bathroom for the same price?”

A N DY WA RH OL , I MAG E A ND A RT WOR K © 2024 TH E A N DY WA RH OL

of shipping, materials, and manufacturing may have forced many Last October, when Phoebe Philo finally dropped her first solo

FOU NDATI ON FO R TH E V I SUA L A RTS, IN C./ LI CE N SE D BY A RS.

brands to hike their prices to make a profit—and, in turn, to shift
their focus away from aspirational shoppers and toward the kind
of super-wealthy customer whose spending habits are not directly
dictated by the economy. Chanel, for example, typically reviews the
prices of its handbags twice a year (as do many similar companies), a
process that generally results in a small increase, but its classic quilted
flap bag now retails for more than $10,000—nearly twice as much
as it cost five years ago.
Not that any of this is stopping people from buying, though—in
fact, Chanel is reportedly opening private stores intended solely for
these top clients. “The definition of luxury, to me, is exclusivity,” says
stylist Amanda Murray. “It’s why people spend all of this money—
because they don’t want to walk down the street and see someone
else wearing the same thing.”
collection after years of anticipation, the overwhelming public reac-
tion was one of rapturous excitement—followed by some woeful
eye-watering at the sight of the prices: On the low side, custom-
ers could find a pair of $450 sunglasses—but shoes ran anywhere
from $1,100 to $1,750; trousers $1,400 to $2,400; knits $3,600 to
$4,800; and handbags $3,500 to $8,500. The highest-priced item
was a $25,000 shearling coat, followed by a $19,000 sequined dress.
To be fair, Philo is far from alone with these kinds of numbers.
Visit almost any luxury store, or sort from high to low on any
designer website, and you’ll likely find something similar—and
someone pulling out their credit card or filling up their >1 2 4
SEEING DOLLAR SIGNS
The bottom line: Fashion has gotten more and more expensive.

122 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM

 New Technology, Endless Comfort
Imaan Hammam, Body by Victoria Invisible Lift Demi Bra & Body by Victoria Smoothing Shimmer Brief Panty
 virtual shopping cart. (Philo’s drops, which are small-batch to min- become a resale sleuth,” says Malinsky. But sometimes even resale
imize waste, sell out almost instantly.) Meanwhile, a pair of jeans and sample-sale prices can feel expensive. (My RealReal credits cer-
from Hedi Slimane’s Celine can cost upwards of $1,150; a Khaite tainly aren’t stretching as far as they once did.)
Fair Isle cashmere sweater, $3,400; and an intricately embroidered Along with shopping secondhand—and more and more sales—
Prada mini skirt, $6,500. I’ve been leaning on my own closet. (After all:
Just because numbers are higher across the Nothing looks better than free!) I’ve also turned
board, though, doesn’t mean that everyone— To alleviate the feeling of away from bigger luxury brands and toward
or even big spenders—can adjust accordingly. smaller, independent labels such as the New
“I’m a big Prada girl—I usually buy two pairs sticker shock—and, York–based Kallmeyer. While the prices may
of shoes every season, and maybe a runway of course, to offset costs— be only slightly lower, I feel like I have a better
look,” Murray says. “But now I look at the sense of where my money is going and who
price point and it’s just: Wow—that skirt with I will go down rabbit I’m supporting—both of which are important
the flowers on it is $11,000. Obviously, it’s so holes on The RealReal to me if I’m going to be spending that much.
beautiful—but it’s clearly not for me; it’s for Designer Daniella Kallmeyer originally
someone else.”
and stalk items until priced her signature 007 blazer at $595—a
In the face of such numbers, price- they drop to a price that fraction of the price of its luxury counterpart—
conscious shoppers are simply buying fewer but when the cost of its poly-wool blend inev-
big-ticket items—and when they do decide
feels more reasonable itably went up, rather than simply increase
to take out their wallets, they’re being much the price she saw an opportunity to improve
smarter about it. “I’m always asking: What is the material? Where the piece’s construction and material to make it more versatile.
is it from?” says Marlowe Granados, a writer and filmmaker whose It now costs $750 and is made of a sustainable Japanese wool.
style I’ve long admired. “I would understand a price that accounts “It’s more expensive,” Kallmeyer says, “but they’re actually getting
for craftsmanship, and for materials—but when it’s a viscose blend, a better product.”
I’m like: What are we actually paying for?” Then again, there’s another tried-and-true way to avoid sticker
To alleviate the feeling of sticker shock—and, of course, to offset shock we haven’t yet discussed: Just close your eyes, if you can. “I can’t
costs—I will go down rabbit holes on The RealReal and stalk items think about it for too long, or else I’ll get upset,” Granados says of
until they drop to a price that feels more reasonable. “I’ve definitely her approach. “I’ll deal with the consequences later.” *

Home Grown

LE FT: D EW I TA N N ATT L LOYD/COU RT ESY OF J. LOH MANN GALLERY. R IGH T: TONI D E J ESUS.
the J. Lohmann gallery. (Amor perfeito is
Portuguese for both “pansy” and “perfect
love.”) De Jesus also left his fingerprints
Fanciful work by ceramist Toni De Jesus in the clay—a soft-paste porcelain created
conceals a personal message. from a recipe provided by the Nantgarw
China Works Museum—making an already
personal project even more so. He presented
the work with several other floral pieces

W
hen Glynn Vivian, a public (including a pot covered in orchids native to
art gallery in Swansea, Wales, Madeira, where he grew up), calling the col-
approached Toni De Jesus lection “He Loves Me…He Loves Me Not.”
about participating in a show De Jesus’s father was taken aback when
called “Queer Reflections” in 2022, the Por- he first saw Amor Perfeito, but that reticence
tuguese British artist jumped at the chance. soon relaxed into acceptance. “It was due
There was, however, one problem: His to this piece,” the artist reflects. “It’s quite
father didn’t yet know he was gay. impactful how a bit of porcelain could make
So, De Jesus—a ceramist known for his you live your true self.”— 
poetic experiments with form and pattern—
came out through his work. Inspired by a
19th-century plate with a pansy motif from
Nantgarw China Works, a former porcelain
factory in Wales’s River Taff valley, he set
out to craft a modern, queer-coded vase that
also embraced the delicate floral. “I knew
the connotation pansy has with the queer
community—and how they’ve reclaimed
the word,” he says. “I also wanted to do so.”
The result? Amor Per feito, a vessel FLOWER POWER
adorned with purple and yellow pansies
that, after debuting in Swansea, traveled to
the Design Miami fair in December with

124 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM

 New Technology, Endless Comfort
Doutzen Kroes, Body by Victoria Invisible Lift Demi Bra & Body by Victoria Smoothing Shimmer Brief Panty
2024
 *

*
In a 28-day study applying a 1% Pentavitin® formulation, skin remained hydrated for 72 hours.
COLEHAAN.COM/VOGUE

Live to Tell
The powerful, engrossing documentary
High & Low: John Galliano sees
the designer tell the story of his life.
By Maya Singer.
here’s a little hidden park, Le Jardin des Rosiers–Joseph-
T Migneret, in the heart of the Marais in Paris. The secluded
spot takes its name from the principal of a local elementary
school, who—after witnessing the roundup of 165 of his
Jewish students in 1942—committed himself to the anti-Nazi resis-
tance and scrambled to keep as many other young people from the
gas chambers as he could. “N’oubliez pas!” commands a plaque in
the park. “Do not forget!”
A leisurely 10-minute stroll away from Le Jardin des Rosiers–
Joseph-Migneret, you will find La Perle, a hip brasserie with outdoor
tables jammed up against one another in the classic Parisian manner.
People go there to be seen, and one night in 2011 what onlookers
saw was a man insulting the couple beside him, saying, among other
132 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM
FROM THE HEART
Galliano, seen here at his home in France in 2022,
is nakedly honest in recounting his experiences.
choice phrases, “I love Hitler,” and “People like
you would be dead—your mothers, your fore-
fathers, would all be fucking gassed.” Some-
one recorded the rant with his phone. It’s an
upsetting video: Upsetting because of what the
man is saying—noxious, shocking things—
and upsetting, too, because the man saying
them is drunk beyond proper cognition, eyes
dim, slurring his words. This man, of course,
is John Galliano, creative director of Dior at
the time and, by general consensus, one of the
world’s great fashion designers, acclaimed for
his theatrical magpie vision and the maximal-
ist joie de vivre of his clothes. How did this
person, so affirming of life’s splendid variety
in his art, find himself in such an abject state,
giving voice to such hate?
That is the question at the heart of High &
Low: John Galliano, Kevin Macdonald’s new
documentary. Produced in association with
Condé Nast Entertainment and grounded in
probing interviews with Galliano himself—
as well as with confidants including Naomi
Campbell and Kate Moss and former col-
leagues such as LVMH executive Sidney
Toledano—the film seeks neither to absolve
nor to condemn. Rather, it serves as a robust
examination of a complex, contradictory char-
acter. “It’s a kind of detective story,” says Mac-
donald. “Me trying to figure this man out: the
world he comes out of, the experiences that
shaped him, what’s going on in his head. But
if you watch the movie, you see that John’s
trying to figure that out too. In some ways, he’s a mystery to himself.”
By his own admission, Macdonald “isn’t a fashion person.” British,
and a bit younger than his subject, he was aware of Galliano as a
figure in the zeitgeist, the prodigy–enfant terrible who shot from
working-class obscurity in south London to the apex of fashion,
becoming the first designer from the UK to take the reins at a Pari-
sian couture house. One pleasure of making the film, Macdonald
says, was acquainting himself with Galliano’s work—its synthesis
of rich storytelling, far-flung references, and dazzling craft. High &
Low gives Galliano his full measure as an artist. “But then there’s
that video,” adds Macdonald, who previously directed the documen-
tary One Day in September, about the murder of Israeli athletes at the
1972 Olympics in Munich. “And it’s repellent.”
“I’ve got relatives who died in the Holocaust,” he continues. “But
I, personally, like John, and I think he’s a genius. I also know he’s
an addict—and so what I see, too, in that video, is a man who’s
destroying himself.”
The film’s point of view is kaleidoscopic, its narrative juxtaposing
the ecstasy of creation, the insane pressure of heading a global luxury
brand as the fashion industry was speeding up, and the demons left
FRA N ÇO I S HA L A RD.
over from an often cruel and closeted childhood. (One can trace
these same arcs in Alexander McQueen’s extraordinary career and
ultimately tragic life.) The key juxtaposition in High & Low, though,
is between the scourge of antisemitism and the scourge of >1 3 7
@ F P M O V E M E N T | F P M O V E M E N T. C O M
EXPLORE THE CAMPAIGN
F P M OV E M E N T. C O M
 addiction. One theory offered for Galliano’s remarks at La Perle—
put forward by an addiction psychiatrist who worked with Galliano
during his recovery—is that, by planting himself in a public spot in
one of Paris’s historically Jewish neighborhoods and saying things
like “I love Hitler,” he was committing “social suicide.” If that was
the subconscious plan, it worked: When the video emerged, Galliano
was pilloried in the international press, sacked from both Dior and
his LVMH-owned namesake label, and cast into exile—canceled, as
we say nowadays. Then, controversially, he came back. In 2014, John
Galliano, clean and sober, was appointed creative director of Maison
Margiela, and his collections continue to earn critical acclaim.
“What do you do with someone like John Galliano? What I
like to say is, ‘We don’t do cancel culture—we do counsel culture,’ ”
notes Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-
Defamation League. (Greenblatt’s predecessor in that role, Abe Fox-
man, decried Galliano’s comments before offering him guidance on
making amends.) “I do think there’s a difference between someone
who’s not in control of himself saying those things—and maybe not
even understanding why he’s saying them—and what we’re seeing
now, which is famous people, people in positions of power, going
on social media and broadcasting their antisemitic views to a global
audience,” Greenblatt continues. “And one difference is that in 2011,
the public response was overwhelming—this behavior is abnormal;
it’s not acceptable. What you see in the film is that John understood
that, and that he’s gone on to learn and to become a better person.”
Macdonald leaves it to viewers to judge the sincerity of Galliano’s
attitude shift. Some may choose to believe him when he says, in the
film, “It was a disgusting thing, a foul thing, that I did…. It was just
horrific.” Others may remain in doubt. Watching the film, Galliano
still seems taken aback by the fact that the man slurring those vicious
words is actually him. But that’s the thing about addiction: People
become unrecognizable to themselves. Accountability requires reck-
oning with mistakes you don’t remember making.
In another era, Galliano’s rants might have drifted off into the
Paris night, remembered only by the customers at La Perle who heard
them. But by 2011, there were plenty of video-enabled smartphones
around, and we’d just entered the social media echo chamber. The
takedown of John Galliano was an early example of the power of
these technologies to gin up an outrage machine. Now, of course, it’s
all outrage, all the time—and in another accident of timing, High &
© V I CTO RI A A N D A LBE RT M US EU M, LO N D O N/COU RT ESY O F FRE DE RI C K WA RN E & CO. LTD.
Low is coming out at a particularly fraught moment. Whether you
define the term broadly or narrowly, antisemitism is more visible now
than it has been for many years. It feels less “abnormal,” as Greenblatt
puts it. Macdonald, though, didn’t intend his documentary to play
LI N D ER B EQU EST. M US EUM N O. BP.238 ( FO R TO P) , B P.14 25 ( FO R BOT TO M) .
into debates over, say, the conflict in the Middle East, or what con-
stitutes bigotry. He was interested in questions raised by Galliano’s
story about what to do about bigots: When to punish, when to for-
give. “At the start, I thought, Well—Galliano is an interesting way
of talking about cancel culture,” he recalls. “But I gave that up pretty
quickly. There are so many layers to John, and I realized that it was
much more interesting just to tell the story of the man.
“And John was incredibly open,” Macdonald continues. “He was
allowed to look at cuts of the film, and there’s stuff that must have
been hard for him to watch, but he didn’t object to anything—or,
actually, he had two notes: One was that I’d said something was ‘cou-
ture’ when it was ‘prêt-à-porter,’ and he wanted that corrected. And
the other was: He didn’t want the film to be depressing—not for his
own sake, but for other addicts. I think the way he looks at La Perle
is that while it’s the thing that destroyed his life, it also saved his life.
Whatever else people take from the film, that’s what he wants people
to see—that there is life on the other side.” *
The Custom of
the Country
A new exhibition traces how a love of
nature grew in Beatrix Potter.
W
hen author and illustrator Beatrix Potter would
trudge through England’s Lake District in her
favorite wood-sole clogs and tweed skirt (a piece
of sacking added to fend off the rain), she often
carried a walking stick with a magnifying glass in the handle—
the better to inspect specimens of yellow cowslip or twisting
meadowsweet. “I can imagine her tramping up and down the
hills,” says Morgan Library & Museum curator Philip Palmer,
“getting the magnifying glass out to look at plants and mush-
rooms and animals.”
Palmer organized Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature, on view in
Manhattan at the Morgan through June 9, which traces the story
of the best-selling children’s book author 120-plus years after
the publication of The Tale of Peter Rabbit. The presentation is
rooted in Potter’s passion for the natural world, which began in
her cloistered childhood in Victorian London (homeschooled
by governesses, with few friends and little parental interaction),
where she found solace in sketching animal and plant life from an
early age and maintained a menagerie of pets: mice, newts, birds,
a stalwart spaniel named Spot, and rabbits christened Benjamin
H. Bouncer and Peter Piper. In her 20s, a fascination with
fungi almost led to a career as a mycologist, and later in life
she became dedicated to sheep farming and land conservation.
In this exhibition, watercolors, sketchbooks, scientific draw-
ings, and family photographs
sit alongside a collection of
picture letters addressed to
youngsters—in which, through
charming sketches of animals
and a gently humorous tone, she
perfected the storytelling skills
for which she is so beloved.
—  
DOWN THE GARDEN PATH
top: A sketch from Potter’s archive.
left: The writer and illustrator,
age 15, with her cherished dog Spot.
VOGUE.COM MARCH 2024 137
 Quick Change
The promise of color-adaptive beauty
products? Your most flattering
shade is just a chemical reaction away.

he first compliment I received at Vogue came thanks to a

T drugstore impulse purchase. It was 10 years ago, during my

first days as a beauty assistant at our labyrinthine old 4 Times
Square offices. As I made my way down a corridor known for
star sightings ( Julianne Moore once smiled at me there), I ran into
a colleague, Chioma Nnadi, whom I’d heard editors describe as the
most stylish person on the planet. “You always have the perfect lip
color,” she said, and asked me what it was. Flattered, I told her about
the chubby MoodMatcher pencil I picked up next to the cash reg-
ister at Hudson Square Pharmacy downtown. On contact its color
changed from a light blue to pink, after which I’d blot everything
away, leaving only a cherry ice-pop stain that stayed all day. (Even
now, MoodMatcher is billed as “the original color change lipstick”
that “works with your chemistry to create a totally customized shade
that’s truly your own.”)
I recently reminded Nnadi of this exchange, and she revealed that
she still has the product somewhere—and so do I. Lately, however,
newer “pH-matching” and “color-adaptive” formulas have launched
with ingredients so good you can sleep in them, like Youthforia
BYO Blush Oil, and textures so natural you don’t have to dab them,
like the Rosy Lip Enhancer that Hermès Beauty creative director
Gregoris Pyrpylis applied to models on the house’s spring runway.
(As he puts it, one shade has the ability to “become one with the skin,
just like the collection.”) But even before my 4 Times Square days,
Dior Beauty was designing the inaugural Lip Glow “color awakening
balm” of 2009. “It was the first time that the color-reviver technology
was used in a more institutional product,” says Peter Philips, creative
and image director of Christian Dior Makeup, noting that Dior’s
general credibility made it feel less like “a gimmick.” (Years later I
would wear Lip Glow to my wedding, doing my own makeup in my
childhood bathroom.)
It’s 1:05 a.m. in New York when I finally hop on a call with
Michelle Wong, the Sydney-based chemist and educator at Lab Muf-
fin Beauty Science whose popular TikToks simplify industry-speak.
“It sounds much cooler than it is,” she says of the “technology” behind
pH-powered makeup. “As far as I know, most of the ones on the
ROUGE AGENT
Most pH-powered makeup uses Red 27, a dye that
shifts to a sheer red tint on contact. Model América González,
photographed by Nadine Ijewere, Vogue, April 2023.
market use Red 27.” The colorless hero dye shifts to a sheer red tint
above a pH 2.5, while another common ingredient, Red 21—the
dye used in Lip Glow and Estée Lauder’s Pure Color Envy Color
Replenish Lip Balm—goes from beige to reddish between pH 0 and
3. Red 27 also swaps what Wong calls “hiding power,” an ability to
cover what’s underneath, for staying power. “In makeup, there are
pigments and dyes,” she explains, likening the former to oil paints,
the latter to watercolors. “Pigments are little, solid particles that have
hiding power. So in regular lipsticks and eye shadows, you generally
have pigments. But this is actually a transparent dye. It will sink into
the skin and stain it a little bit.” The effect plays up whatever color
already exists in your lips—or cheeks, if you like to wear it there.
(When it comes to more sensitive areas like the eyelids, however,
the use of Red 27 and Red 21 is not FDA-approved.)
Layering can customize the hue, an approach that Rihanna
endorses. The Fenty Beauty founder added just one Match Stix
Color-Adaptive Cheek + Lip Stick (in the shade Strawberry Pop)
to her core collection. “I love its ease,” Rihanna tells me over email
when I ask how she’s using it herself. She takes it “everywhere”
and likes to swipe the balmy formula “on the apples of my cheeks,
and even bring it up to the temples to give that really fresh wash of
color, but with some drama”—drama that she can play up or down
“with how many layers you apply.” After Fenty changed the industry
with a 40-shade foundation range in 2017, a single product designed
for everyone feels futuristic. “I’m all about beauty for all—creating
options that really work for people and their skin tones, their skin
types, their style,” Rihanna says. “What’s more beautiful than a color
that becomes uniquely you?”—  

138 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM

 The End of Glitter?
Or are we just at the beginning—of a new era
of microplastic-free, perfectly-healthy-to-eat (!) sparkle.
Tamar Adler reports on glitz to feel good about.

id you know that blue morpho but- amateur seamster—to make room for boxes sparkle, opalescence, and fins. “Glitter has

D terflies, one of the most iridescent

animals on earth, have only brown
pigment in their wings? Or that the
single most vibrantly colored living thing is
the berry from an African plant called Pollia
condensata—which doesn’t have any pigment?
and boxes of loose glitter, glittery nail pol-
ish, glitter eye shadow, glitter bath bombs,
and so on.
Glitter is in the air, both figuratively
and, I recently learned, literally—from Lil
this emotional play to it,” says Donni Davy,
makeup artist for the opulently bedazzled
Euphoria. Glitter is transgressive—you don’t
wear it to look sexy; you wear it to look cos-
mic. “Without light, glitter just looks like
Nas X as a glitter cat at last year’s Met Gala particles,” Davy says. “But when the light
P RO P ST Y LI ST: LU N E KU I P E RS.

“You’re trying to distract me,” says my
husband, to whom I’m helpfully reciting
these facts. He’s relentless. He should have
been a lawyer. “Tell me you’re not about to
fill our house with glitter.”
The delicate thing is that I am. I’m
packing away his sewing supplies—he’s an
(courtesy of Pat McGrath) to #Mermaid-
core, the social media aesthetic that merges
RAZZLE-DAZZLE
In October the EU banned microplastic glitter,
prompting a wave of reformulations in
cosmetics. Photographed by Lara Giliberto.
hits, it comes alive.”
My husband’s objection derives from the
unfortunate fact that glitter is composed of
microplastics—bits of plastic smaller than
five millimeters. And microplastics are now
found in, among other things, tap water,
breast milk, fruit, rain, and antarctic >1 4 4

142 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM

 snow. They’ve made their way to locations
as far-flung as the Mariana Trench and
Mount Everest. The glitter found in much
nail polish or eye shadow has historically
consisted of polyethylene terephthalate
(PET) or polyvinyl chloride (PVC), layered
with aluminum and styrene acrylate, and
then finely cut into geometric shapes. All
the glitter ever made still exists. Remember
how in the 18th century Antoine Lavoisier
declared that matter can never be destroyed?
I think he meant glitter.
n October the European Union, infer-
I ring that microplastics shouldn’t be
so omnipresent, banned microplastic
glitter. By 2027, it will be illegal to put
glitter in shower gels and face wash. By
2035, in any makeup at all. How many
pounds of microplastics have you licked off
your lips in your decades of adulthood? I
call Phoebe Stapleton, associate professor
of pharmacology and toxicology at Rutgers.
“Microplastics are in our blood, our placen-
tas, our body tissues. They’re everywhere
we’ve looked so far,” she says. The sources of
our internal microplastics are wide. “Glit-
tery makeup isn’t of any more concern than
all other sources of microplastics. But there
isn’t any less concern either.”
I search “biodegradable glitter” and dis-
cover that in recent years, there’s been glitter
made from the cellulose of eucalyptus trees
and wood pulp—materials that are used in
some biodegradable plastic bags. According
to a number of researchers, however, these
“biodegradable” glitters are only theoret-
ically biodegradable: They only decom-
pose in particular conditions—specifically,
in industrial composters. Which would
mean coming home f rom a night out
and scraping one’s makeup off into a
compost bucket whose contents will be
appropriately processed.
But then I have an epiphany! Remember
edible glitter, that modish ingredient which
sparkled atop lattes and pizza circa 2017?
Per instructions on Craftsuprint.com, I
combine kosher salt with red food coloring
and bake it at 350 degrees for 10 minutes,
using the precious time to find Vaseline—
which should turn my homemade glitter
into lip gloss. I eagerly retrieve my baking
sheet. I grant that my salt is Diamond Crys-
tal Kosher and my red food coloring is made
of organic beets, but what I end up with is
not sparkly at all. I apply it as lip gloss and
look like I have smallpox.
Might professionally made edible glit-
ter offer more promise? Recently, a com-
pany named Fancy Sprinkles has started
144 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM
making FDA-approved edible glitter out
of mica—a group of 37 silicate minerals
found in granite and other rocks—dextrose,
rice protein, and food dyes. When my
samples of Fancy Sprinkles arrive, I bake
a batch of corn muffins and blanket them
in glitter. Corn muffins have never been
so golden! I pour Champagne Rose Gold
Fancy Sprinkles into my seltzer and cheers
to my success.
But my cheers were premature. What
I want is sparkly makeup, not muffins.
Attempts to suspend Fancy Sprinkles in
Vaseline are only nominally more success-
ful than my efforts with salt. I can’t achieve
anything like Euphoria’s glittery tears. Per-
haps I’ve been doing needless work. Maybe
cosmetics companies have already figured
this out. Donni Davy’s exquisite line, Half
Magic, hasn’t yet been reformulated to meet
EU regulations—though she says she’s
excited by the challenge. “It’s going to push
innovation. It’s a necessary and ultimately
good thing.” Davy sends me a synthetic-
I paint on some Nails
Inc Bioglitter polish
and flutter around like a
climate-resilient fairy
mica-based Half Magic Glitterpuck, a
shimmery powder, which has admirable
sparkle and much more staying power than
my homemade attempts.
I learn from James Newhouse, head for-
mulator for the beauty brand Chantecaille,
that the company, founded in 1998, has
never used microplastic glitter. He sends
me a lipstick that twinkles with micro-
scopic gold, even once applied. I feel like
Beyoncé. Newhouse, a chemist by training,
explains that its glitter comes from boro-
silicate pearl pigment, while the trio of
shadows in Chantecaille’s spring 2024 col-
lection derive their sparkle from mica from
the Responsible Mica Initiative. (Though
mica is a naturally occurring substance,
mica mining has historically been plagued
with humanitarian violations, mostly stem-
ming from illegal child labor.) I’m not a
regular makeup wearer, and my avant-garde
assays with Chantecaille’s glittery eye shad-
ows elicit a shrill scream from my son.
On to more experiments! I call Jeanne
Chavez, veteran of 1990s cult-favorite cos-
metics brand Hard Candy, to talk About-
Face, the line she has developed with her
fellow Hard Candy alum Dineh Mohajer
and Halsey (who is “very much into sparkle
and glitter,” Chavez tells me). Microplas-
tic glitters were never an option. “We said
to our labs: Please don’t show us anything
that isn’t cleanly formulated,” Chavez says.
I smugly sign for a shipment of lip gloss,
plus five vials of loose glitter—in shades
like Saint Ceremony, Out of Body, and
Ascent—and a number of glimmery and
pearlescent Shadowsticks and Eye Paint.
The glitter in all of them comes f rom
sustainably mined, finely milled mica or
borosilicate. I murmur in my husband’s
direction about how hope sparkles eternal
if one is only willing to do one’s research.
This is further proven by my tests of Gen
See, an environmentally conscious cosmet-
ics company that works with a sustainable
mica mine in Hartwell, Georgia. Gen See
Mixed Media Metallic Liquid Eyeshadow
is a joy to apply to my eyelids—which I’ve
now become accustomed to blanketing with
sustainable gold sparkles every morning.
I admit to a certain amount of theatrical-
ity when I dump a package of pink glitter
directly onto our backyard. But it’s Bioglit-
ter, the only cellulose glitter that will actu-
ally decompose naturally—thus certified
by European third-party auditors, whom it
would be folly to doubt. I think about glu-
ing some to my nails. But I don’t have to!
Bioglitter is the shimmer in all of Nails Inc’s
Bioglitter polish. I paint some on and flutter
around like a climate-resilient fairy.
But why not flutter around like a morpho
butterfly? The most promising advances
in sustainable glitter are perhaps unsur-
prisingly based on shimmer in nature: the
wings of a blue morpho butterfly, the feath-
ers of a peacock and kingfisher, and the
Pollia berry. All get their remarkable effects
f rom something called structural color,
which relies on microstructures that inter-
fere with light. Two producers—Sparxell
in the UK, ChiralGlitter in Canada—have
engineered cellulose nanocrystals that
mimic these naturally occurring struc-
tures, and both tell me they’re already in
conversations with cosmetics companies
as they work to scale up production. No
matter how often I check, samples don’t
arrive from either, leading me to believe
I overplayed my insistence that I wasn’t a
corporate spy.
In the meantime, I’ll wear my responsi-
ble mica and borosilicate sparkles, and keep
faith that the future is sufficiently bright
and bedazzled. And that—thankfully—we
won’t have to cause further ecological insult
to get there. *
 Purina trademarks are owned by Société des Produits Nestlé S.A.

Cat adored.
Chef inspired.
LOVE IS IN THE DETAILS
®

FancyFeast.com
 On His Terms
With leading-man roles on screen and stage, the
cerebral, highly disciplined actor Tobias Menzies is stepping
(carefully) into the spotlight. By Sarah Crompton.
W
ith his red cap pulled down over horn-rimmed glasses,
Tobias Menzies walks into a London hotel with the
wariness of a man who might just be recognized. It’s
his face that would catch him out, those deep lines
running from eyes to chin. “He had those even as a young man,”
says his friend the theater director Rupert Goold. “It’s like someone
has taken a knife and carved them. And I feel those lines run deep
inside him as well. He’s grown into his face like a lot of actors do.”
Menzies’s smile is warm and his handshake firm, and though he
lives not far from here in north London’s Crouch End, he is dressed
more as a country dweller than a man-about-town, in jeans and blue
gilet zipped over a soft mustard-and-red-checked shirt. Only his
Grenson trainers, white and red and with flashes of the same yellow,
suggest he might belong to an artier milieu.
“I don’t get recognized on any intrusive level, but it’s not a part of
[the job] that I love,” he admits as we settle down to talk. “I like to
watch people—I don’t like them to watch me.” I’ve asked him about
the experience he’s having at 49—that of a talent stepping into his
prime. Blame it on The Crown, in which he played the second incar-
nation of Prince Philip across two seasons (a role that won him an
Emmy), and last year’s wry, acclaimed comedy You Hurt My Feelings,
in which he starred opposite Julia Louis-Dreyfus (“He’s one of the
most warm and present actors I’ve worked with,” says its director,
Nicole Holofcener). And now, he’s appearing in two leading-man
roles, as Edwin Stanton, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war, in
148 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM
Apple TV+’s series Manhunt in March, and he’s currently onstage
in The Hunt, an adaptation of the 2012 Thomas Vinterberg film
directed by Goold, playing at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn five
years after its London premiere.
“I’ve got to be honest, I really liked it,” Menzies says of the status
he enjoyed in Manhunt. “Being in the engine room of it and part of
the storytelling decisions.” The series is part thriller and part his-
tory lesson, set over the 12 days following Lincoln’s assassination
in 1865 as Stanton attempts to track down the president’s killer,
John Wilkes Booth (it’s based on historian James L. Swanson’s 2006
bestseller). Episodes skip forward and backward, tracing the story
of a tumultuous time and the ideological schisms that caused the
Civil War and continued long after it. Stanton, a brilliant lawyer
and strategist, is at the center of everything, clashing with Lincoln’s
successor, President Andrew Johnson, as he attempts to preserve the
late president’s legacy.
As gripping as any detective story, Manhunt addresses painful facts
of America’s past: “The implications of losing Lincoln and what
that meant for African American people,” says showrunner Monica
Beletsky, who spent four years developing the project and who has
COU RT ESY O F A P P LE .
followed Menzies’s career since they overlapped as students >1 5 0
TRACKING DOWN
Menzies leads the new Apple TV+ series Manhunt, based on the best-selling
book about the search for Abraham Lincoln’s assassin.
 at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London (she
on a stint studying there from the US). “You could argue in a way
that the Confederates won the peace,” Menzies points out. “What
is important about Monica making the show is that she is a person
of color, and arguably the big fallout from Lincoln’s assassination
was that Reconstruction was lost until 100 years later and the Civil
Rights Movement of the 1960s. Voting rights, land rights—they
didn’t happen. A lot of the things that African Americans have been
fighting so hard for, for so long, were on Stanton’s agenda.”
Menzies studied carefully for the role (“He prepares months in
advance,” says Beletsky), working to find Stanton’s voice and make
his accent seem effortless, but also reading widely about the Civil
THE ACCUSED
War and its aftermath. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s classic history Team
Menzies stars in
of Rivals was a particularly rich source: “It takes you into this very The Hunt, a St. Ann’s
disparate group Lincoln collected around him,” Menzies says. “There Warehouse revival
was such a diversity of opinion and a lot of antagonism, but that was of the acclaimed
part of the power of it.” Menzies also studied Gregory Peck’s tow- 2019 London play.
ering performance as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. “I was
thinking of those archetypes that American literature and film are
full of,” he says. “Because it’s such a whirlwind story with so many dif- Cheek by Jowl. “I was interested in companies that were making
ferent characters floating through it—so you need a moral compass.” their own work,” he says, “and I tried to go to train with [the radi-
The key to the character became a combination of “stoicism and cal movement coach] Jacques Lecoq in Paris; but I didn’t have the
radicalism,” Menzies says—and as an actor, he’s exceptionally good money for that, so I went to RADA.”
at playing men who are fighting such opposing impulses, with strong He never dreamed of being a famous actor. “My obsession as
currents of feeling running beneath an impassive surface. “He is one a kid was tennis,” he says, with a grin. He was good enough to be
of those rare actors who does a lot with silence,” Beletsky says. “He on the fringes of the team for the county of Kent but gave it up
makes you believe you can feel what he is thinking, and he can do when he realized he would never be truly first-class. He stopped
those things without saying a word.” playing for a long time. “Periodically I
Goold, who has directed Menzies would pick up a racket and try to play a
many times onstage—including as Ham- Menzies is attracted to roles that bit, and my game had completely fallen
let, as Valentine in Tom Stoppard’s Arca- conceal depths. “There is a certain apart and it made me so angry. It was so
dia, and as Edgar in King Lear—thinks frustrating. A few years ago I thought,
this quality has become stronger as magic about that. Part of the Let’s start again, do my 10,000 hours,
Menzies has grown older. “He’s got this maths is that there is more on the and let’s fix it.” He approached the task
wonderful physical expressiveness, but with “monomaniacal” intent, working
there’s a slightly remote quality to him, inside than on the outside” for a year on his forehand, and a year
I suppose,” Goold says. “The quality I on his backhand, then adding his serve.
find really compelling in him is his committed curiosity. It’s quite Now he plays three times a week at a local tennis club, either with a
rare, especially for British actors, to keep their craft developing, to coach or taking on other members in clay court matches. “I’m pretty
become more rigorous and investigative, and I think Tobias is an obsessive about it,” he says. “I just find it fascinating. It is such a
outlier on that.” mental game—a very interesting microcosm of one’s brain.”
Their most recent collaboration is The Hunt, a haunting story in His hero is Novak Djokovic. “He has less natural flair than Nadal
which a small-town teacher becomes ostracized when a six-year-old or Federer but there is an epic quality to his tennis. He is able to
child accuses him of abuse. Menzies will be reprising his devastat- endure and suffer, and so he can do it all in some way. There is a sort
ingly observed performance from the play’s 2019 London premiere. of purity to what he is doing. I think only if you have struggled with
“When we put it on, we felt it to be about false accusations and the tennis do you realize that even though it looks plain, what’s going
way that cancel culture was creating pariahs,” says Goold. “But it is as on, the footwork, the ability to get to that ball and then hit it—it’s
much about someone who is shut out from their community because just rather remarkable.”
they choose to live apart. There is part of Tobias that is like that.” Menzies admits that his attitude to life mirrors his tennis. “I
Menzies acknowledges that he is attracted to roles that conceal am probably on the methodical end of things, yeah,” he says, with
depths. “It’s partly a taste thing,” he says. “I like the kind of acting another low laugh. I ask about his film roles, which have been getting
where I can’t see the performance, I can’t see how it is happening. bigger and richer of late. He loved filming in New York with Holof-
There is a certain magic about that. Part of the maths is that there is cener on You Hurt My Feelings—“It was definitely bucket list”—and
more on the inside than on the outside, there’s a kind of mystery there.” is currently appearing alongside Brad Pitt in the as-yet-untitled For-
mula 1 drama directed by Joseph Kosinski, which is filming scenes

M
enzies was born in London, his father a radio producer at Grand Prix around the world.
for the BBC, but after his parents separated when he Before the actors’ strike interrupted production, they had shot two
MA RC BRE NN E R.

was six, he lived with his mother, a drama teacher, and scenes at Silverstone in the UK. “It was bonkers because we are in
his brother in Kent. On their regular cultural outings, amongst everything else. So we did this scene on the grid before the
he was inspired by contemporary dance and the experimental theater race and the grid is live: real drivers, real cars, celebrities wandering
companies he saw: Pina Bausch, Complicité, Shared Experience, around.” He pauses, then adds: “It was like C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 6 0

150 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM

 Tangier Dreams
With its fleet of exciting cultural hubs and
smart new hotels, the storied North African city
has never been more inspiring to visit.
here are few cities in the world as
T romanticized—or misunderstood—
as Tangier. Perched on the north-
ernmost tip of Morocco, near where
Africa reaches out to Europe across the
Strait of Gibraltar, this teeming, multicul-
tural metropolis is dominated by one period
of history in the Western public conscious-
ness: its mid-20th-century phase as a colo-
nial “international zone,” when it became as
infamous for its liberalism (read: licentious-
ness) as its sweeping Mediterranean views
and architectural marvels. Here, William S.
Burroughs drafted Naked Lunch in a frenzied
haze of hashish and oxycodone; Mick Jagger
recorded “Continental Drift” in a Moroc-
can palace; and Yves Saint Laurent estab-
lished his final home within a peaceful, leafy
villa overlooking the bustling medina and,
beyond it, the craggy southern edge of Spain.
Yet over the past few years, Tangier has
undergone a quiet renaissance. Locals have
founded a new wave of cafés, galleries, and
cinemas showcasing the city’s contemporary,
cosmopolitan vibe. (Keep it quiet, though,
as the emphasis here is on building a slow
and sustainable kind of tourism, where pro-
moting the rich creative spirit of a younger
generation, rather than catering to the vices
of Westerners, is the mission.)
Accompanying this surge of newly
opened cultural hot spots—including the
Museum of Contemporary Art, housed in
a former prison, and the Cinémathèque de
152 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM
A PLACE IN THE SUN
clockwise from top left: Villa Mabrouka’s
elegant garden; a table set for afternoon tea in the
villa’s Mynott pavilion; the former primary
bedroom is now the sumptuous Marrakech suite.
Tanger, reviving an iconic Art Deco movie
theater—is a fresh spate of ambitiously de-
signed hotels. Kicking things off last winter
was the Fairmont Tazi Palace, situated on
a hilltop surrounded by a eucalyptus forest.
Saunter through its lavishly decorated cor-
ridors (the building, an Andalusian-style
fortress, once belonged to an adviser of the
former king); wander its landscaped gar-
dens perfumed with pomegranate trees; or
explore the vast spa
c o m p l e x , w h e re a n
outdoor pool is fringed
by palms. Though less
than 15 minutes from
the ancient heart of the
city, with its lush, oasis-
TO P LE FT: A N DR EW MO NTG O ME RY/V I LL A MA B ROU KA .CO M. TO P RI G HT A ND BOT TOM : VILLAMABROUKA.COM.
like setting, it feels a
whole world away.
The jewel in Tang-
ier’s f reshly polished
crown, however, is Villa
Mabrouka, the former
home of Saint Lau-
rent and his partner,
Pierre Bergé. It was
opened by design guru Jasper Conran last
year as a sister property to L’Hotel, his riad
in Marrakech beloved by the London cre-
ative set. In Tangier, Conran lets the villa’s
gorgeous architectural features sing, punctu-
ated by bohemian antiques and zesty flashes
of butterscotch yellow and lime green—as
well as a Slim Aarons–worthy pool ringed
by butterfly-laden palm trees and fragrant
bushes of mint leaf. It’s the best of both
worlds: Moroccan design flair and French
hospitality (don’t miss the oysters and fish
tagine prepared by an in-house cook), and
old-world glamour that also looks toward
the future. Or, to put it more succinctly:
It’s Tangier.— 
The only podcast that takes you
inside the world of Vogue

HOSTED BY CHIOMA NNADI

AND CHLOE MALLE.
FOLLOW WHEREVER YOU GET
YOUR PODCASTS.

Storied Lands
A range of backdrops
provide the grounding for
spring’s best fiction.
he follow-up to 2017’s National Book Award finalist The
T Leavers, Lisa Ko’s Memory Piece (Riverhead Books)
is a moving, strikingly evocative exploration of New
York’s art, tech, and activism scenes across the decades.
The novel follows three teens from mall-bound suburban New
Jersey into adulthood as they forge their own paths in a rapidly
changing world. Chafing against the
assumptions projected onto them as
Asian American women and resist-
ing the stifling expectations of their
immigrant parents, they yearn for
freedom—from the demands of race,
gender, and family—while grasping
at the expansive futures they once
imagined.—  
A faded estate on Maryland’s Ches-
apeake shore, packed with family
members for a Fourth of July weekend
and haunted by its history, provides the
backdrop for Christopher Tilghman’s
elegant, boisterous, and moving new
novel, On the Tobacco Coast (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux). Mason’s Retreat is
the name of this farm and ancestral seat, tumbledown in haute
WASP fashion, a place of brackish marsh air, oyster shells, and
drawers jammed with mismatched cutlery. Tilghman has now
written four acclaimed novels located amid this landscape,
exploring rich themes of race, class, and privilege along the
way. Tobacco Coast is the first set in the present, and it teems
with convincing characters: Kate and Harry, the owners grap-
pling with mortality; their three grown children warring with
respective partners; a pair of French cousins;
a clutch of aged neighbors. Tilghman ranges
through them—the inner life of a Vassar coed
is as accessible to him as that of a 96-year-old
Chesapeake matron—as they assemble for a
gloriously described meal where buried con-
flict and sublimated pain inevitably intrude.
— 
A wry and winning debut f rom Vanessa
Lawrence, Ellipses (Dutton) charts the course
of a mentor-mentee relationship as toxic as it
is intoxicating. Lily, a 30-something magazine
writer grappling with her role in the endan-
gered ecosystem of prestige print media, slips
154 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM
into the thrall of a lopsided power dynamic with
Billie, a cutthroat and self-assured beauty CEO who
issues sharp adages from her lacquered thumbs. With
the relationship conducted entirely over text, Lily’s
life becomes suspended in the digital limbo of an
anticipated blue text bubble, the ellipsis of the novel’s
name. They meet when Lily is reporting on one of
the “disease-oriented galas”—an Alzheimer’s Unfor-
gettable Evening—and we accompany Lily on a roller
coaster of self-doubt and eventual self-actualization
set against the backdrop of the rise of digital media.
Lawrence, who wrote for W and WWD for the bet-
ter part of two decades, deploys
her insider fluency with aplomb,
describing the microaggressions of
office politics as deftly as the nepo-
baby influencers turned vegan cater-
ers.— 
Set in the not-so-remote past of
the 1990s, Ordinary Human Failings
(Little Brown and Company) feels
just distant enough to offer a foreign
landscape, devoid of cell phones
and an immediate multicultural
perspective that greater connectiv-
ity affords. The Green family is at
the center of Megan Nolan’s grip-
ping new novel; they’ve settled into
insular life on a London housing
estate, having haphazardly fled Ireland after the daughter, Carmel,
became pregnant. Circling this unfortunate family is a hungry
young tabloid reporter, who senses in the Greens just the kind of
mess that his readers love to disdain. With her careful and caring
novel, Nolan shows how misfortune can
start with a few bad decisions and how
M EM O RY P I ECE : R I V ERH EA D BOO KS. O N TH E TO BACCO COAST : FSG. EL L I PSES: P E NGU IN RAND OM H OUSE/DUTTON.
culpability is entangled in providence
and privilege. Her prose is slicing and
exacting; this is a book that smarts but
also comforts with its precise generosity.
— 
OR D I NA RY H U M AN FA I L I NG S: L I TT L E, BROW N A N D CO MPA N Y. H EL P WA N TED: W.W. NORTON.
The events in Adelle Waldman’s
fleet-footed novel Help Wanted (Nor-
ton) take place at a box store of declin-
ing fortunes in upstate New York—a
setting that in Waldman’s steady hands
proves to be a crucible of ambition and
survival. We are with Team Move-
ment, the corporatized name given to
the employees who show up at 4 a.m.
to unload trucks full of household
goods and move them to the retail floor.
Waldman is unsentimental about her low-wage protag-
onists, investing them with foibles as well as everyday
heroism, and she’s mesmerizing on the details of their
work, the mechanical belts, the “throwing” of boxes,
the meticulous unpacking. A single paragraph on the
difficulty of untangling bras has thrilling specificity.
In their petty and casually unempathetic supervisor,
Meredith, the novel finds its engine of suspense, a
middle-management villain whose team comes to believe
must be promoted to be vanquished.—..
 STOR E
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 Mrs. Prada Almost everyone refers to Miuccia Prada in the
most formal of ways, but she herself has never been
one to stand on ceremony. Wendell Steavenson
meets a designer who has built an empire in her
own image: iconic, iconoclastic—and enormously
influential. Photographed by Stef Mitchell.

IT WAS NOVEMBER AND A little windy on the balcony of the
Ca’ Corner della Regina, the 18th-century palazzo that is home
to the Prada Foundation in Venice, where Miuccia Prada was
posing for photographs against the backdrop of the Grand Canal.
She clasped a red silk coat (from her very first collection in 1988)
over a citrine sweater, bright and sharp against the gray sky and
the terra-cotta, ochre, and verdigris of deliquescent Venice. She
wore no discernible makeup; her long blond-and-auburn hair was
unstyled and hung in soft curls at her shoulders. When it fanned
in the breeze, she joked about looking very 1990s, like Cindy
Crawford in a wind machine.
Afterward, several of us gathered around a table for lunch. Mrs.
Prada, as she is deferentially known, took off the two grand gold
necklaces (one of lions’ heads) and the other medallions she was
wearing and laid them on an adjacent chair, as if relinquishing the
heavy chains of office, and began, Italian-mama style, to spoon
rice onto our plates. The lunch was simple: chicken patties, braised
endive, spinach, and salad. The vegetables, she said, came from her
garden in Tuscany—oh, yes, she nodded, she takes a close interest
in the planting. There is not much, I would come to understand,
that Prada does not take a close interest in.
Prada, now 74, reminded me of the late Queen of England: a
diminutive older lady, magnificently costumed, who commands
a regal presence with a softly-spoken manner and a genuine curi-
osity about both things and people. She is surprisingly warm,
self-deprecating, and has a gentle, musical laugh. We discussed
the current exhibition at the palazzo, “Everybody Talks About the
Weather,” a thought-provoking interplay of historical paintings,
contemporary artworks, and scientific information about the cli-
mate crisis. Prada lamented that it was difficult to find curators
who could link art and academic inquiry to put on the kind of
ambitious, multidisciplinary exhibitions she wanted the founda-
tion to show. She had been struggling, for example, to find the
right person to oversee an exhibition on feminism: Who could
unite such a disparate field—and how best to communicate com-
plex and challenging concepts?
“I want culture to be attractive,” she said.
When lunch was over, Prada helped clear away the plates to a
side table, looped the heavy chains back around her neck, and our
interview began.
“Fashion is one third of my life,” said Prada, who has created two
celebrated fashion labels, Prada and Miu Miu, and, together with
her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, helms the Prada Group, a global
luxury brand with $4.5 billion in annual revenue (as of 2022) and
over 13,000 employees. (Prada Group also has a stake in Church’s
shoes.) The second third of her life, she says, is “culture and the
Fondazione.” Since its creation in 1993, the Prada Foundation has
become a leading proponent of contemporary art. “After, there is
family and friends, and possibly some pleasures.” She paused to
reconsider. “Actually, they all overlap. I try to make my life useful.”
Prada likes the word useful; she dislikes the word luxury, which
she finds vulgar. And here is the rub, the nub, the dichotomy that
runs through her life and her work: Miuccia Prada is an extraor-
dinarily successful fashion designer selling beautiful, expensive
clothes and accessories. She is also—something confirmed with
a nod when I asked—politically left of center, with a doctor-
ate in political science (she also studied mime for five years), a
former member of the Italian Communist Party who marched
for women’s rights. “I always thought there were only two noble

170
 ANGLE OF REPOSE
“I am interested in the
lives of people,” says
Prada, photographed
here at the Prada
Foundation in Venice.
“It’s not designing—
it’s putting together
personalities,
histories, pieces
of life, good, bad.”
Fashion Editor:
Alex Harrington.
 SHE’S GOT...
clockwise from top
left: Gigi Hadid
wearing Prada from
fall 2007, fall 2017,
Miu Miu spring
2008, and Prada
spring 2009.
...THE LOOKS
clockwise from
top left: Hadid
in Prada fall 2013,
spring 2011, fall
2009, and fall 2010.

173
professions: politicians or doctors,” she told me. “Doing clothes
[while coming from] a group of very important intellectuals—for
me it was like a nightmare. I was so ashamed, but anyway I did it….
The love of beautiful objects prevailed.” Her political opinions have
mostly had to be kept private. “I work for a luxury company,” she
said, laughing at the irony. “It’s not perfect for a political position like
mine—this was always the biggest contradiction in my life.”
Miuccia Prada was born Maria Bianchi into a well-heeled bourgeois
Milanese family in 1949. Her grandfather Mario Prada had founded
Fratelli Prada (“Prada Brothers”), a leather-goods shop, in 1913; her
mother took over the family business in the 1950s.
“When I was young,” Prada told me, “I always wanted to be dif-
ferent.” She immersed herself in the activist generation of the 1960s,
but she always loved clothes—while everyone else was wearing jeans
at demonstrations, she famously wore Yves Saint Laurent.
“Some people,” I suggested, “don’t want to do what everyone
around them is doing.”
“ That is probably really deeply a part of myself,” Prada
acknowledged.
And while she rebelled against the bourgeois assumptions of her
upbringing, she joined the family business, taking it over from her
mother in 1978. That same year, she met Bertelli, the founder of a
rival leather-goods company, at a trade fair. They joined forces, both
personally and professionally (marrying in 1987), and she began
playing around with the idea of a nylon backpack: practical, light-
weight, water-resistant, useful. When it first went on sale in 1984
it was far from successful, but a high-end brand making a product
that was then considered a cheap, everyday item was groundbreak-
ing; soon it became an iconic piece—one that illustrated a tectonic
shift in fashion. In 1988, having renamed herself Miuccia Prada (by
having her unmarried maternal aunt legally adopt her), thus bond-
ing herself to both the brand and the family business, she launched
her first ready-to-wear line. “I’m not even able to draw,” she told
me—but she knew what she wanted to wear, and she worked with
an intuition that suggested a deep reservoir of knowledge.
Prada and Bertelli had a son, Lorenzo, only two months after
that first show. (A second, Giulio, followed two years later.) When
I asked her how she had managed that first year, she was sanguine.
“We didn’t even know, within the family, that at the same time we
were building [Prada],” she said. “Probably, we like to be working,
we like to be active.”
Her first collection, an exemplar of the Prada style, featured neu-
trals contrasted with bright colors; straight-cut masculine trousers
and clumpy, rubber-sole loafers; details and silhouettes that harbored
echoes of military uniforms; and a knee-length skirt that would soon
become a signature.
Prada was original. She opposed the pristine, languid lines of
Armani and the va-va-voom of Versace and Dolce & Gabbana,
her Milanese peers. “To have an idea of a woman as a beautiful
silhouette—no!” Prada said to me. “I try to respect women—I tend
not to do bias dresses, super-sexy. I try to be creative in a way that
can be worn, that can be useful.”
One whole collection was made of nylon; another was an ironic
exploration of her own dislike of lace. Her work, famously dubbed
“ugly chic,” made clashing—acid green and brown, chunky cable
RUFFLED AND READY
Hadid redefines sporty chic in a coat, shirts, briefs,
and bag from Miu Miu’s spring 2024 collection.
“To have an idea of a woman
as a beautiful silhouette—no!”
Prada says. “I try to
respect women... I try to be
creative in a way that can
be worn, that can be useful”
knits and gauzy transparents, retro and future, plastic and crystal,
socks with high-heel sandals, the bourgeoisie and the rebel—cool.
She played around with 1950s nostalgia, 1980s minimalism, and
hideous color schemes from the 1970s.
“Of course badness is everywhere—in the movies, in art, in life,”
Prada told me, “but somehow what they call bad taste was never
accepted in fashion. Back then it was kind of a scandal, an insult;
even now, fashion is sometimes the place of clichéd beauty, but it’s the
cliché of beauty that has to be completely taken away—yes, changed.”
Success was sudden and stratospheric. In 1993, Miuccia Prada
began to design a second label, Miu Miu—the name is what her
family called her when she was a child—which seemed to provide
an outlet for her whimsy, with sparkles and pink and cartoon curves
that spoofed girlishness. She also expanded early into Asia, added a
men’s line in 1993, and debuted Prada Sport in 1997, pairing perfor-
mance fabrics with urban chic and presaging athleisure by a decade
or two. Prada set trends—she never followed them, always chasing
that which was “more interesting, more new, more daring, more
exciting,” as she told me. “Risk is something I kind of like.”
“Miuccia is just being very true to herself,” said Bertelli, explaining
his wife and partner to me. “Interrogation, curiosity, intellectual hon-
esty…. She may be quite a contrarian, but she has very specific his-
toric references, and she has an understanding of costume which is
absolutely deep.” More than mere form and function, Prada’s clothes
are, she insists, narrative. “I am interested in the lives of people,”
she said. “So, it’s not designing—it’s putting together personalities,
histories, pieces of life, good, bad.”
For Catherine Martin, the costume designer with whom Miuc-
cia Prada collaborated on Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, Pra-
da’s work embodies a kind of practical feminism centered around
nothing less than “what it means to be a woman—a powerful
woman, and a working woman, and a mother, and a homemaker,
and a sexual being.”
“I personally have many characters in myself,” said Prada, “and I
think that many people have different characters in themselves: the
feminine part and the masculine part, the gentle and the tough.”
It comes as little surprise, given her youthful background in agit-
prop and protest, that Prada remains very much aware of the wider
world far outside fashion—its wars and suffering, its array of cri-
ses and injustices. “That’s why I am always ashamed,” she told
me. Publicly but quietly, as well as personally, Prada supports a
myriad of causes, including cancer research, but she tends to be
discomfited by showy fundraising galas, preferring engagement
175

She is very much aware of
her age. “It’s strange,”
Prada says, “because every single
morning I have to decide
if I am a 15-year-old girl or an
old lady near to death”
to mere charity. The company invested in the development of a
regenerated nylon yarn, ECONYL, launched in 2019, which it
now uses in its products, donating 1 percent of the sales to their
Sea Beyond project with UNESCO, which is dedicated to ocean
preservation and education. “It’s something real, tangible—it’s not
just a gesture,” she said. “If you really want to be generous, you have
to impact your life.”
Prada cleaves to a kind of no-nonsense practicality. “I do clothes
for a commercial company, and our goal is to sell clothes,” she
says. She is less interested in exploring fashion as a kind of gen-
dered costuming than she is in allowing people to find their own
way of expressing themselves, which is in turn about "freedom—
representing yourself. We should be able to be who we choose to
be, always.” She insists that “fashion is a little small thing, I think:
Get dressed in the morning, and afterwards you do something else.”
Mostly, she wants her clothes to be “useful, [so that] people feel
happy when they wear it,” she said, before correcting herself: “Happy
is a big word.” Instead, she wants people to feel “confident—that
they can perform in life. Fashion is a representation of one’s vision
of the world. Because otherwise, I think fashion is useless.”
I
met Miuccia Prada for the second time at her apartment in
Milan. She still lives in the same building she grew up in,
with various family members in apartments upstairs from
her. The gate was opened by a butler and I was led across
a leafy, cobbled courtyard into a large, modern, vaulted
room separated by huge bookcases into quadrants of seat-
ing areas. Sofas were upholstered in jewel tones, large modern and
contemporary paintings created blocks of color on the walls, and a
green velvet Verner Panton Cloverleaf sofa nestled on a black shag-
pile rug. In an adjacent space, a long gallery containing a Damien
Hirst vitrine of surgical instruments gave out into a pretty garden.
We sat at a table painted with an antique map of the world, with
Prada sipping from a cup of herbal tea. Looking at the many books
surrounding us, I asked her what she was reading. Rising, animated,
she walked away and quickly returned with five books under her arm:
a history of women and resistance; a history of fascism; The Kremlin
Ball, a novel of political fiction by the late Italian writer Curzio
Malaparte; a volume of Schrödinger bookmarked with a children’s
drawing; and a thick tome of philosophy that “a friend told me it is
very easy to read.” She laughed. “I read one third so far!”
The Prada Foundation is an outlet for Miuccia Prada’s intellec-
tual brio. She has had the unusual good fortune to educate herself
in contemporary art by “reading, and talking with artists—many
176
became really friends,” and by buying art to understand it. “I hate
the idea of being a collector,” she said. “For me, it was kind of part
of the learning process.” In the past, she has been discreet about the
extent of her involvement with exhibitions, allowing the foundation
to establish itself independently from the fashion brand, though
now she has publicly taken on the role of director. “I’m trying,” she
said, “in my last years to be more political, more effective.”
The Prada Foundation opened its site in Milan in 2015. Conceived
and designed by Rem Koolhaas and his firm OMA (also respon-
sible for the dramatic interior of the Prada store in SoHo in New
York), the space was built around an abandoned distillery and is a very
Miuccia mix of iceberg cool and warm opulence. A gleaming white
tower is finished in concrete mixed with marble dust; beams installed
to protect against earthquakes are painted orange; the original dis-
tillery building (known as the Haunted House) is gilded in 24-karat
gold leaf; the Podium exhibition space is clad in foamy-looking aer-
ated aluminum panels; and the Godard cinema has a wild garden on
the roof. Inside the foundation’s spectacular and almost surreal spaces,
you can grope your way through a pitch-black Carsten Höller laby-
rinth and emerge into a room of hallucinogenic mushrooms hanging
upside down and spinning; recoil at a Damien Hirst canvas composed
of dead flies; or ascend in a giant elevator that can hold a hundred
people to view the entirety of Milan and the jagged Alps beyond.
The German artist Thomas Demand, whose work has featured
in 11 projects with the Prada Foundation over the past two decades,
describes the foundation’s Milan home as “public discourse—you
can see intelligent things which you can’t see anywhere else. It tries
to convince people that art plays a role in our life.” The foundation
commissions new artworks, hosts concerts and cinema screenings,
lectures, and symposia. Patronage, though, is another word Prada
doesn’t like. “When they say you are sponsoring culture, I say, ‘No—
we want to be part of creating culture.’ It’s not about money—it’s
about bringing together efforts, people; proposing and finding solu-
tions.” The site in Milan has done nothing less than pioneer the
regeneration of an industrial district; it has turned the city into a
contemporary art destination. On a Saturday, Demand says, the
space is full of people walking and talking. “Milanese people really
use it as a corso,” a promenade, he said.
The evening before we spoke, Prada had hosted the legendary con-
ductor Riccardo Muti, who was visiting Milan to teach a series of
classes in front of an audience at the Prada Foundation.
“He’s incredibly interesting,” Prada told me. “He talked about the
structure of conducting, what it means to be a conductor. He said
how much every single phrase, every single note has a reason.”
That same evening, I had attended the opening of a show at the
foundation’s Osservatorio, an exhibition space in an attic above the
flagship Prada store in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. “Calcu-
lating Empires,” co-curated by Kate Crawford, a leading scholar in
the social implications of artificial intelligence, examined the con-
nection between technology and power over the past five industri-
alized centuries. A few days before, recounted Crawford (wearing
a classic Prada pleated skirt with a kilt buckle), Miuccia Prada had
done a walk through of the exhibition accompanied by Hans Ulrich
Obrist, the director of London’s Serpentine gallery, and immediately
grasped the intent of the main work—a vast and intricate diagram
depicting the connections between communication and computa-
tion, quantum mechanics and algorithms, architecture and astro-
spheres—and making a comparison to Marx’s analysis of production
methods in the 19th century.
 While Prada is an intellectual shark, constantly learning, thinking,
and working, in conversation she is gently funny, laughs often (usu-
ally at herself ), listens intently, and questions her own statements.
As we spoke, she often voiced an opinion and then worried that it
might come across as too polemical.
“When you’re really smart and you have a lot of thoughts, I think
you want to expose them to the rigors of conversation with other
people,” Catherine Martin told me. “Miuccia is like a one-person
salon.” Prada says she has very little social life, but this is a little
disingenuous. “I think she doesn’t like to be social just for the sake
of being social,” her son Lorenzo Bertelli told me. “She loves to be
confronted by people with different points of view.”
“I am better at working than talking,” Prada said. “If I want to
know somebody, I want to work with them. All the enthusiasm,
the research—I like working, it’s a way of really communicating a
mindset, ideas.”
Her circle is both wide and distinguished. Wes Anderson designed
the café at the Prada Foundation in Milan in pistachio and pink, a
pastiche-homage to traditional Milanese cafés; the late Franco-Swiss
director Jean-Luc Godard donated his atelier-cum-living room,
which is now on display there; Jacques Herzog, the Swiss avant-
garde architect, describes the latticed Prada building he built in
Tokyo with his partner, Pierre de Meuron, as an “interactive optical
device”; a Höller slide connects Miuccia Prada’s polished concrete
office to the ground floor; Hirst, meanwhile, created a Prada hand-
bag studded with insects.
Thomas Demand recalled that when he first met Prada, he had
been trying to figure out how to realize a complex art installation,
and she had told him that his difficulty reminded her of her own
designing handbags. Prada, Demand said, “recognized the trial, the
error, the way things come together in manufacturing and don’t look
like what you want, and [so] you have to take it off the table,” he said.
“[She was] hands-on, and also honest.”
Prada acknowledged her role of sage arbiter, a little chagrined,
perhaps, that wisdom comes with age. Though she seems to enjoy
the exploration more than the explanation, she told me that she
knows when something is right because it makes her smile.
Prada is, at heart, a family business. The Prada-Bertelli family
dynamic is discussion, debate, dialectics. Conversations with Prada
and her husband and son veered easily into the heavyweight terri-
tory of philosophy and philology. According to Lorenzo, different
views produce a better synthesis. (Lorenzo also said that it was
quite hard to change his mother’s mind—unless he had a very
well-prepared argument.)
“I like to push, because in the push you become more creative,
more intelligent,” Prada told me.
I asked Patrizio Bertelli why his partnership with his wife had
been so successful. “I ask myself the same question all the time,” he
said. “We never worked because we were anxious to become famous
or rich—we worked for the pleasure of doing something that was
interesting and constructive, and to enjoy it, to have fun.”
Their two halves—one creative, the other commercial—have
forged a powerhouse global brand in the span of a single lifetime.
Prada is now listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange, though
the family still owns 80 percent of the business. The couple, now
both in their 70s, have been careful in planning a smooth succes-
sion. A new CEO, Andrea Guerra, was installed just last year,
and Lorenzo, who gave up a professional rally racing career with
his own Fuck Matiè team to join the company in 2017, is now in
charge of technology, marketing, sustainability, and the company’s
new fine jewelry division.
In 2020, Prada stunned the fashion world by announcing that Raf
Simons, the enormously respected Belgian designer, would come
aboard to codesign the label alongside Miuccia Prada as an equal
creative partner, collaborator, and instigator.
When I asked Simons why he had said yes, he answered me in one
word: “Miuccia—as simple as that.”
Like his collaborator and creative partner, Simons didn’t go to
fashion school (he studied industrial design) and easily admits that
“my interest in art is much bigger than my interest in fashion.” The
two had long been admirers of each other’s work, and both spoke
of the need for reality, practicality, meaning, and, yes, usefulness
in their collections. And though their collaboration began with
the understanding that if either really hated the other’s idea, they
wouldn’t do it, they both told me that they have found working
together nothing less than a meeting of minds.
“It’s going very well,” Prada said. “We have the same taste, and
most of the time we have exactly the same idea. He’s a very nice
person and intellectually honest—the most important quality.”
“It clicked in an incredible way,” said Simons. “I think that we
are [both] dialogue people—she likes collaborating, she likes to
work with people—needs it, I think. Anything can be a starting
point, whether we love it or hate it or think it’s silly or funny or sad
or stupid or political.”
Prada told me that she is very much aware of her age. “It’s strange,”
she said, “because every single morning I have to decide if I am a
15-year-old girl or an old lady near to death.” But her creative drive
has hardly dimmed. The collaboration with Simons—their latest
collection presented new riffs on military motifs and transparency
against the backdrop of a slime waterfall—has blended cool with
commercial to critical acclaim, and her own recent shows for Miu
Miu have been cutting-edge and timely. Her scissor-chopped outfits
for spring 2022—“a joke for me about the erogenous zone,” she had
said afterward—went viral on TikTok and were modeled on the
runway beside a film by Moroccan-born artist Meriem Bennani.
(Increasingly, Prada has invited artists from around the world to
create video displays to accompany her shows.)
M
aria Bianchi wanted to be different. Miuccia
Prada worked hard to be good and to do good,
and then to get better and to do more. Mrs.
Prada, in her golden age, is a push and pull of
contentment, yet still seemingly never satisfied.
“When people say, ‘Are you happy about
your achievement in fashion?’ I really, sincerely, couldn’t care less,”
she said. “I think about what I have to do next. I am ambitious, I
want to be good. And sometimes I think I am good—a great exhi-
bition, a good piece of clothing—but only for a second.”
She admits that she finds it difficult to be proud of herself.
“Decent is not enough,” she told me, going on to mention a past
exhibition that had not turned out as she had hoped. “For me,” she
said, “it was a failure.” She said she avoids her own shops “because
my imagination is so high, I am scared of the reality.
I asked her if it was difficult to be a brand.
“To do it: no,” she said. “Because it’s basically [about what] we
liked. The concept is very easy. But then you have to live it, embody
it, be responsible for it.” She said she would love to be able to con-
centrate on pure creativity, to spend the “whole day working only
on fashion—it’s like a vacation!” But there were always multitudes
177
178
 STAND AND DELIVER
Hadid wears a spring
2024 Prada jacket, knit
top, skirt, shorts, belt,
and shoes. opposite: left
to right, top to bottom:
Prada spring 1996; Miu Miu
spring 2011; Prada spring
2024; Prada spring 2008;
Prada fall 2022; Miu Miu
fall 2008; Prada fall 2014;
Miu Miu spring 2010;
Miu Miu spring 2022. In this
story, for Gigi Hadid: hair,
Akemi Kishida; makeup,
Karin Westerlund. Details,
see In This Issue.
P HOTOG RA P H ED AT DAYLI G H T STU D I OS.
S ET D ES IG N : A N N E AU BE RT.
 LEANING IN
The designer in a rare
moment of rest.
“I am better at working
than talking,” she
says. “If I want to know
somebody, I want
to work with them—
it’s a way of really
communicating a
mindset, ideas.”
“I like to push,” Prada says,
“because in the push
you become more creative,
more intelligent”

of decisions and requests, and “every single day you have to solve
at least, creatively, 20 different things…. And now we have to solve
the problem of the Chinese New Year!” Apparently no one had yet
come up with a good concept for the shopwindow displays.
“And you are involved in this decision?” I asked.
“I am involved in everything!”
I raise the notion—surely something she’s heard once or twice
before—that she must be a perfectionist.
“Possibly,” she conceded. “Yes.”

O
n that final third of her life—the part that’s about
family and fun—Prada is reticent. Past interviews
have revealed only scant, banal details: She loves to
be in nature, especially in the mountains; cuts her
own hair; drinks a cup of hot water first thing in
the morning. From the few glimpses she allowed
in my conversations with her—her sons and husband are fixated
on cooking and kicked her out of the kitchen a long time ago; she
is planning an exotic garden of succulents and spiky plants at her
house in Southern Italy; she has lost several people close to her in
recent years, “but recently I am again in a good mood”—it was clear
that this part of her life is as rich and full as the others.
It’s hard not to sympathize with her guardedness: Prada is the
public face of a global brand, but deliberately has no social media
presence, very rarely appears on television, and often seems shy in
public, bowing briefly at the end of her runway shows before disap-
pearing behind the curtains.
“She looks very reserved,” said Bertelli, “but it’s a question of
privacy—she’s not shy.”
I asked him what made his wife happy. “When she works, she
is happy,” he said. “When she does beautiful things, she is happy.
When she travels, she is happy. When she spends time with intelli-
gent people, she is happy.”
Lorenzo said that his mother was happiest with her family,
which recently had a new addition: Lorenzo’s first child, a daugh-
ter. “Now, for sure, that she has a grandchild,” Lorenzo said, “she
is super happy.”
Prada smiled broadly when I asked her about her granddaughter.
“I have to learn everything,” she said, “because I don’t know the
education points today. Also dealing with young kids with media,
telephones, and so on, all the arguments that I don’t know how to
master. I have the responsibility of educating the girl,” she said.
“I think I will be a good [grandmother]—I will teach, but I will
also be fun.” *

180
PRO DUCE D BY K I T T E N PRO DUCT I O N. PHOTO G RA PHE D AT
FO NDA ZI O N E PRA DA , CA’ COR NE R D E LL A REG I N A I N V E NI C E .
D E TA I LS, S E E I N T HI S I SSUE .
LOUISE TROTTER,
CARVEN
For Trotter’s 2023 debut
for Carven (founded
in Paris in 1945 by
Marie-Louise Carven),
she played to her own
strengths and that of
the house: fashion and
functionality, writ
large. Doutzen Kroes
wears a Carven parka
and shirt; carven.com.
Fashion Editor:
Camilla Nickerson.
 in Numbers
There have never been
more female designers—
or more questions about why
they sometimes still
need to fight for their place
in fashion. Vogue celebrates
a global cast of women
whose work and influence
speak for themselves.
Photographed
by Bibi Borthwick.
Strength

MARY-KATE
AND ASHLEY OLSEN,
THE ROW
Whether they’re feeling minimalist
or maximalist, what’s always
right about the Olsens is their
instinct to make it chic—and to do
it with conviction. Liya Kebede
wears The Row; therow.com.
 L EFT: COU RT ESY O F V I CTO RI A B ECKHA M . R I G HT: L AU N CH ME T RI CS SP OTLI GH T.

VICTORIA BECKHAM

Victoria Beckham—above, taking a quick runway turn in 2018, and above left at her London home—is the rare celebrity
designer whose second act has utterly eclipsed her first. Launched in 2008, Beckham’s eponymous ready-to-wear collection has
evolved alongside her, from the body-con “results” dresses of its early days to a spring 2024 show with everything from knit
leotards and jersey dresses inspired by her youthful dance training to the kind of outdoor jackets and brogues she wears with her
family at their English countryside retreat. (If you saw the wildly popular Netflix documentary about her husband’s storied life
and football career, you likely caught glimpses of it.) “This is a very personal collection,” she said backstage at that show, but her
philosophy hasn’t changed since her Spice Girls days. As she once told Vogue: “What we did was celebrate being different.
We showed it was okay to be who you are. And that’s what this is about—empowering women through fashion.”—nicole phelps
 REI KAWAKUBO,
COMME DES GARÇONS

When Comme des Garçons’ Rei Kawakubo burst

upon the scene in 1981, the fashion world had never
witnessed anything like it: Her clothes didn’t depend on
darts and seams, and employed fabrics—rumpled and
frayed, some glowing with the sheen of cheap polyester—
entirely new to the Paris runway. And they were almost
always black. Perhaps more than any other woman
designer, she has radically rethought assumptions about
femininity and upended conventional ideas of “sexiness.”
If we now accept without question a genderless playbook
that flaunts unfinished hems, asymmetry, and overblown
silhouettes, we can thank Kawakubo—who has long
since graduated from that early didactic black to prints
and pieces that embrace, with a heavy dose of irony,
proto-feminine polka dots and brocade blossoms. “I never
intended to start a revolution,” Kawakubo (seen here
in Paris in 2023) once said, in a rare public statement.
TO MMY TO N.

She just wanted to create, she said, “what I thought

was strong and beautiful. It just so happened that my notion
was different from everybody else’s.”—lynn yaeger
186
 DONATELLA VERSACE

Beyoncé in sculpted chain

mail at the premiere of Renaissance;
Amal Clooney in glittering bronze
paillettes at the Fashion Awards in
London; Anne Hathaway—up next in
The Idea of You, early this summer—
seen here in this liquid gold tank dress:
Nobody understands evening
glamour quite like Donatella Versace
(even if the woman herself prefers
tailored black jackets and pants of the
sort she’s selling in the new Versace
Icons collection, which, she told Vogue,
was “a little reminder about who is
in charge”). Donatella has led Versace
for over a quarter century—few
women designers working today can
lay claim to that kind of longevity
(with the exception of her fellow
Milanese visionary, Miuccia Prada;
see page 170). Perhaps it’s because of
her close relationship with her late
brother Gianni that she doesn’t see the
world—or the design studio—in
strict binaries. “Obviously, anyone who
identifies as a woman understands
a woman’s body differently than a man
HA I R , OR LA ND O PITA ; M A K EU P, T YRO N M ACHH AUS EN .

PUG H AT M HS A RT I STS. D ETA I LS, S E E IN T HI S I SSUE .

does,” she says, “but all designers

PRO DUC E D BY A L ST U D IO. SE T D ESI G N : M O NTA NA

have different strengths. For me it’s

about a strong and confident point
of view. We have to ensure that female
voices are listened to, promoted,
and championed.”—n.p.

Anne Hathaway
Photographed by Annie Leibovitz
Hathaway wears a Versace dress;
select Versace boutiques.
Fashion Editor: Max Ortega.
 DAMI KWON
AND JESSICA JUNG,
WE11DONE
This Seoul label is
pronounced “well-done,”
and that’s certainly
true of Kwon and Jung’s
streamlined look, with
its au courant whiffs of
both the ’90s and the
noughties. Kroes
wears We11done shirt;
we11-done.com.
beauty note
A modern power lip can
do more than you think.
Clinique Dramatically
Different Lipstick Shaping
Lip Colour in Angel Red
is designed to enhance
lip definition over time.

188
 VICTORIA BECKHAM, ISABEL MARANT
One is a former pop star who’s now an established designer; the other is a rock star of a designer. What got
them there was their own look and attitude projected with confidence on to their clothes. Kroes wears a
Victoria Beckham jumpsuit; victoriabeckham.com. Kebede wears an Isabel Marant jumpsuit; isabelmarant.com.
 HA I R , EUG EN E SOU LE I MA N ; M A KEU P, LAUR EN PA RSON S. P RO DUCE D BY ST UD I O DE M I.
S ET D ES I G N: JEA N- HUGU ES D E CHATI LLO N . D E TA I LS, S EE IN TH IS I SSU E.

Taylor Russell
Photographed by Paolo Roversi
Russell—making her New York
theater debut in The Effect at
The Shed this month—wears a Dior
shirt and pants; Dior boutiques.
Fashion Editor: Vanessa Reid.
 MARIA GRAZIA CHIURI, DIOR

For Maria Grazia Chiuri, leading a fashion house doesn’t mean

anything if you only ever put yourself at the center of it. “From the
beginning, the idea was to show how much fashion is a big
community,” says Chiuri, seen above in Dior’s Paris atelier. “I needed
to have other voices to speak about femininity, about feminism,
about values.” From that first collection for spring 2017, with its
HA I R , TOSH ; M A KEU P, L AU RE N BOS. P RO DUCE D BY ROSCO P RODUCTI O N .

clarion call of We Should All Be Feminists (emphasis on we),

she has rejected the industry’s deification of the solo designer voice
in favor of a choir. In her time at Dior she has worked with, and
lionized, everyone from artist Judy Chicago to designer Grace Wales
Bonner to choreographer Sharon Eyal—not to mention legions
of artisans and makers from her native Italy, as well as Mexico,
India, and across Africa. For spring 2024, Chiuri looked to witches
for inspiration: their wisdom, their intuition, their connection
to nature. “Knowledge was something that patriarchal society had to
take from women,” she says. The parallels with today’s insidious
assaults on women’s agency and freedom aren’t lost on her. “Fashion
is political because it works with the body. There is no other way to
think about it—and that’s central to my work.”—mark holgate

Photographed by Viviane Sassen

Sittings Editor: Taylor Angino.

191
 VIRGINIE VIARD, CHANEL

Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel opened her first boutique in Paris in

1910, long before women in France even had the right to vote.
By the time they finally won suffrage more than three decades
later, she’d built a fashion empire that liberated women from
the trussed-up silhouette of the era. In many ways, her exacting
approach to dressing—unfussy, unadorned, and unequivocally
chic—is right in step with the current mood, even a century-plus
later. That’s not lost on Chanel’s artistic director, Virginie Viard,
the first woman at the helm of the house since its trailblazing

HA I R , TSUK I ; MA K EU P, G RAC E A HN . PRO DUCE D BY CA N VAS PRO DUCT I ON .

founder. “Of course Karl raised me,” says Viard of her longtime
friend and mentor Karl Lagerfeld, with whom she worked
for 32 years. (He famously called her “my right arm…and my left
arm.”) “But more and more, I find myself rediscovering Coco.
That sense of freedom and modernity—it feels like her moment SE T D ESI G N : V I KI RU TSC H. D ETA I LS, S EE I N T H IS I SSU E.

now.” Since she took on the role in February 2019, Viard

has shown a keen sense of how stylish women want to move
through the world—witness actors Phoebe Tonkin (above)
and Louisa Jacobson (at right). “When a woman tells me that
she feels good in her clothes,” Viard says, “that they give her
strength and confidence, it’s really the best.”—chioma nnadi

Phoebe Tonkin and Louisa Jacobson

Photographed by Norman Jean Roy
Tonkin and Jacobson both wear
Chanel dresses and jewelry; select Chanel boutiques.
Fashion Editor: Eric McNeal.
192
 SARAH BURTON,
ALEXANDER
MCQUEEN
Last October, Burton
departed the label
she oversaw for 13 years
with a show that was
a glorious tour de force,
underscoring her
strengths: scalpel-sharp
tailoring and exquisite
artisanal effects.
Kebede wears Alexander
McQueen jacket
and pants; alexander
mcqueen.com.
VANESSA BARBONI
HALLIK
AND ELIZABETH
GIARDINA,
ANOTHER
TOMORROW
For New York–based Hallik
and Giardina, there can
be no style without serious
consideration of ethical
and environmental
concerns. Kroes wears
Another Tomorrow
jacket and pants;
anothertomorrow.co.

195
 GILDA AMBROSIO AND GIORGIA TORDINI,
THE ATTICO

Gilda Ambrosio (left) and Giorgia Tordini had no work experience in fashion studios when
they launched The Attico with a collection of retro slip dresses and boudoir-ish robes in 2016.
Despite the attention they’d garnered on social media, the skepticism that greeted their
debut suggests that the fashion industry is more than a little bit sexist. “It’s a paradox,” they say.
“Who more than women know what women want, feel, and need?” Eight years later, their
line—comprised of everything from vintage-inflected party frocks to tomboy cargo pants and
sweeping duster coats—is stocked in 250 stores worldwide; last September, they staged their
first-ever fashion show on a street in Milan’s chic Sempione neighborhood; and Dua Lipa and
Hailey Bieber have both been seen wearing pieces from the label’s spring collection.—n.p.
 RACHEL SCOTT, GAËLLE DREVET, AURORA JAMES,
EMILY ADAMS BODE AUJLA, CATHERINE HOLSTEIN

“I struggle with the concept of a woman designer,” says Diotima’s Rachel Scott,
O P P OSI T E : A MBROS I O A N D TORD I N I : A RMA N NA FÉ E I. GA R DE N S A N D F RA MES : GE T TY IM AGES.

“because then that’s all you are. Men can be geniuses, but women are ‘collaborative.’”
The New York–based Scott’s work is almost always described in the context
of Jamaica, where she’s originally from, and in relation to the communities she
works with for some of her crochet. “But I actually think that’s more indicative
of what it is to be a designer: people working together.” Scott is part of a cohort of
designers whose fantasy is to dress our reality, our everyday. Such is the case
of Emily Adams Bode Aujla, who helped redirect contemporary menswear with
P RO DUCE D BY A RT P RODUCT I ON . S ET DES I G N : JAV I E R I RI G OYE N.
T HI S PAG E: HA I R, SA B RI N A SZI N AY; M A KEUP, JA N ESSA PA RE .

her distinctive nostalgic and lived-in sensibility, which she’s since expanded
into womenswear. Ditto Aurora James of Brother Vellies, whose work with African
craftspeople for her New York–based accessories label, and subsequently through
her nonprofit organization, Fifteen Percent Pledge, helped draw a blueprint
for creating sustainable, community-first impact through fashion. See also
Catherine Holstein’s Khaite and Gaëlle Drevet of the Frankie Shop, who have
given new shape to the wardrobe of the contemporary woman. Both separately
and together, these designers have defined today’s generation of American
womenswear as both expansive and considered.—josé criales-unzueta

Photographed by Tess Ayano

Designers and mannequins wear fashion from female designers including
Diotima, the Frankie Shop, Rodarte, Marina Moscone, Brother Vellies, Bode, and Khaite.
Fashion Editor: Jasmine Hassett.
197
198
 TORY BURCH

In the dozen or so years that

Tory Burch has been doing
fashion shows, there have been
few minidresses. Pencil skirts
and full skirts with sweeping
Claire McCardell–like volumes,
yes, but rarely anything above the
knees. That changed for spring
2024. “I’m not personally wearing
the short hoop dress,” modeled
here in pink viscose jersey by her
friend Emily Ratajkowski, Burch
says, “but I wanted to really
believe in it and love it, and I spent
a lot of time challenging myself.”
Hoops of this sort were once used
for crinoline rings; Burch said
she likes the idea of turning what,
once upon a time, held women
back into something freeing.
“Where women are today,” Burch
says, “they’re coming into their
own idea of their own sexuality,
their individuality, and when you
think about the landscape of how
you address those needs, you need
to have diversity.” Thus, it wasn’t
all minis on her spring runway:
Burch also showed leg-elongating
P RO DUCE D BY A RT P RODUCT I ON . P HOTO G RA P H ED AT SQUA RE D I N E R.

pants in a coated jersey and

nylon taffeta zip polos—pieces
as utterly unencumbered
as that little pink dress.—n.p.
HA I R , SA B RI N A SZI N AY; M A KEU P, JA N ESSA PA RE .

Photographed by
Tess Ayano
Emily Ratajkowski takes a coffee
break in a Tory Burch dress, earrings,
and bracelet; toryburch.com.
Fashion Editor: Jasmine Hassett.
beauty note
For a universal glow, La Mer
The Hydrating Illuminator levels up
its signature Miracle Broth
with light-diffusing abilities that
work with every skin tone.
 ALBERTA FERRETTI, GABRIELA HEARST
They might seem like poles apart—the romantic (Ferretti) and the realist (Hearst)—
but where they meet is the strongly held belief to always put women first. Kebede wears
Alberta Ferretti; Neiman Marcus. Kroes wears Gabriela Hearst; gabrielahearst.com.
GRACE WALES
BONNER
The Jamaican British
designer’s work is
driven by critiques of
race, gender, and
history—and crackles
with the energy
of someone who
fearlessly engages
with today’s
world. Kebede in
Wales Bonner;
walesbonner.net.

201
 ANNA OCTOBER

Unstoppable is the word that describes Anna

October, the Ukrainian designer (here at
near left with her friend, Brooklyn-based
Ukrainian artist Yelena Yemchuk) who has
been working with a growing team between
Paris and Kyiv. October’s clothes—like
their creator—are confident. They are also
deeply sensual: A genius with body-
caressing slip dresses, the designer likes to
play with texture and contrasts, pairing a
ruffled cape with tailored pants, or using
peekaboo crochet inspired by vintage doilies
discovered in a craft museum. October, who
SE T D ESI G N : M O NTA NA PUG H AT M HS A RT I STS.

wants women to dress to please themselves,

said her designs are “date-ready”—
though the kinds of rendezvous she
imagines could just as easily be with oneself
or a friend as with a romantic interest.
D E TA I LS, S E E I N T HI S I SSUE .
PRO DUC E D BY A L ST U D IO.

—lpird borrelli-persson

Photographed by Annie Leibovitz

Portrait taken in Yelena Yemchuk’s
studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Fashion Editor: Max Ortega.
 WA L L A RT: YE L E N A YE M CH UK . N A N G O L DI N . SA M TAYLO R -JO HN SO N.
TO BY MOT T/DAS HWO O D BO O KS. CU LT MT L.

203
 SIMONE ROCHA, SUPRIYA LELE,
STELLA MCCARTNEY, GRACE WALES BONNER,
MARTINE ROSE, PHOEBE PHILO

Taking the long view, the rich list of women designers working
and showing in London spans generations and ranges
from Mary Quant and Vivienne Westwood to Sarah Burton
and Clare Waight Keller, with each of them honing an
individual, sometimes idiosyncratic, aesthetic. Dublin-born
Simone Rocha (1) is just one of a contemporary cohort of
female designers working in London with an eclectic point of
view. If her label is defined by an ethereal and poetic reverence
evoking the rituals of modern womanhood, the South London–
born, half-Jamaican menswear trailblazer Martine Rose (5) is
defined by an off-kilter twist on mundane corporate tailoring
and sportswear. Spellbound fans of Grace Wales Bonner’s (4)
sermonistic shows, meanwhile, bow down to her colorful and
craft-led precision (not to mention the sellout throwback
sneakers in her Adidas Originals collaboration), pieces
constructed through rigorous academic research that
draw on her Jamaican British heritage. Asian British designer
Supriya Lele (2) infuses the body-flaunting, form-focused
pieces in her collections with the jewel-tone color palette and
details of traditional Indian dress. No contemporary designer,
though, knows cultish adoration better than Phoebe Philo (6).
Her instantly shoppable return to fashion after a six-year
creative hiatus broke the internet when Philophiles flocked
online to buy sumptuous coats and waist-grazing tailoring
from the first drop of the ex-Céline creative director’s M A RCH 2014. GA RD E N S: G E T T Y I MAG ES.

new eponymous brand. Of course, Stella McCartney (3)

ROC H A: A N G E LO P EN N E T TA , VOGU E,

is well acquainted with the concept of fashion brand as global

phenomenon. Since its inception over two decades ago,
her label has pioneered eco-conscious design, and has led the
industry in innovative materiality, regenerative farming,
and upcycling long before everybody else began talking
about sustainability.—laura hawkins 1
Grace Wales Bonner portrait by Zoë Ghertner.
Fashion Editor: Camilla Nickerson.

204
L EL E : W IL L GRUN DY/ K IN T ZI N G. M cCA RT NEY: A N N I E LE I BOV I T Z, VOGU E , AUGUST 2004.
WA L ES BO N N ER : PRO DUC E D BY CON N ECT T HE D OTS. D E TAI LS, SE E I N T HI S ISSUE .
ROSE : A N D RE AS L A RSSO N. PHI LO : DAV I D S I MS, VO GU E, MA RCH 2013. GA R DE N S AN D FRAMES: GETTY I MAGES.

6
3

5
PHOEBE PHILO
She’s back—and how.
It’s fashion (and a
business approach)
on her terms: Make
it special and unique,
and in smaller,
more sustainable
numbers. Yet again,
she catches the
moment. Kebede
wears Phoebe Philo
jacket and pants;
phoebephilo.com.
 NADÈGE VANHÉE-
CYBULSKI,
HERMÈS
You likely won’t know
her because—as always
with the storied French
house—the team comes
first. But her impeccably
made clothes resonate
with intimacy and
intelligence. Kroes wears
Hermès jacket, top,
and pants; Hermès
boutiques. Bibi Borthwick
images: hair, Soichi
Inagaki; makeup,
Celia Burton. Details,
see In This Issue.
P RO DUCE D BY HO LMES P RODUCT I O N. S ET DES I G N : ROXY WA LTO N .
P HOTOG RA P H ED AT WA DD I N GTON STU D I OS.

207
 CHEMENA KAMALI, CHLOÉ

Every day, Chemena Kamali takes this

walk across Paris’s Pont du Carrousel
to get between home and work—yet these
days she could be forgiven for thinking
of her work as a kind of home: Kamali
was appointed creative director of Chloé
last October, the third time she has
worked for the brand. Like any home, it
evokes a very specific series of emotions.
When the Düsseldorf-born Kamali, 43,
was interviewing for the job, she told the
people at Chloé: “I’d really like to bring
back the feelings I had when I fell in love
with the house in the first place—and
I strongly believe that there’s a lot of
women around the world that share that
longing, because Chloé really is an
emotional brand.” The days she is referring
to are when she worked on former Chloé
creative director Phoebe Philo’s design
team in the early 2000s, when clothes were
created with absolute intuition. It’s an
approach that will inform Kamali’s Chloé,
which debuts during Paris Fashion Week
in February. Uppermost in her mind,
though: The spirit that Chloé founder
Gaby Aghion started the house with in
1952. “Gaby was someone who said,
‘I want to dress women to feel more free,
to feel more at ease, so you can live your
life in them, because you have stuff to do,’”
she says. “Chloé shouldn’t impose
anything on you; it lets you be yourself.
That’s what’s powerful today.”—m.h.

Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh

Sittings Editor: Taylor Angino.

208
HA I R , PAW EL SO LI S; MA K EUP, SA ND RI NE CA NO BOC K.
P RO DUC ED BY V LM P RO DUCTI ON S.
 RIGHT ANGLES
“Stockmann is heroic,”
Strong says of his
character in An
Enemy of the People,
opening on Broadway
in March, “but he’s
also an egotist.”
Loro Piana jacket,
sweater, and pants.
Fashion Editor:
Edward Bowleg III.

History Lessons
In the new stage adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy
of the People, Jeremy Strong sees the shadows of current crises.
By Maya Singer. Photographed by Norman Jean Roy.
 I
t’s hot out the day I meet Jeremy
Strong near his home in Brooklyn
to chat about his return to the stage.
“Unsettling” is how the 45-year-
old Succession star describes the late
October weather as we stroll along a
waterfront dotted with sunbathers stretched
out amid fallen autumn leaves. “Every year,
it’s another ‘hottest year on record.’ How did
we get here?” he muses. “That question—it’s
one reason I had to do this play.”
The play Strong is referring to is An
Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen. In a
new adaption by playwright Amy Herzog
opening on Broadway March 18, Strong
takes on the role of Dr. Thomas Stock-
mann, a man who discovers an inconvenient
environmental truth and is pilloried by his
community for revealing it. “It’s easier for
them not to believe,” explains Strong of the
villagers’ reaction to Stockmann’s scientific
data. “Believing would be too disruptive—
politically, economically. You don’t have to
stretch to see the analogy between what
Ibsen wrote in 1881 and what’s happened
vis-à-vis climate change.”
Strong hadn’t been planning to embark
on a grueling 16-week Broadway run. After
the final season of Succession wrapped last
year, he was ready for a break—which he got,
courtesy of the SAG-AFTRA strike that
allowed him to spend a mellow summer at
his house in the Danish countryside with his
wife, Emma, and their three young daugh-
ters. But the issues raised by An Enemy of the
People felt too urgent to pass up when his old
friend theater director Sam Gold urged him
to read the play. “I texted Sam as soon as I
finished it,” recalls Strong. “I was like, Yeah,
we’re doing this.”
An Enemy of the People is an angry play.
Ibsen wrote it in a fury of hurt and bewil-
derment, Strong explains, after his 1881 play
Ghosts, about a woman whose son is dying
of syphilis, was met with a scathing response
from virtually every quarter of Norwegian
society. Ibsen assumed, Strong says, that he’d
be greeted as a hero for taking on such verbo-
ten themes as incest, euthanasia, and venereal
disease; instead, his play was derided as “filth.”
In some countries, the work was banned. “It
was a real lesson in what happens when you
rock the boat,” Strong notes.
Ibsen channeled his post-Ghosts sense of
martyrdom into the hero of his next play.
Stockmann is a whistleblower taking on his
small town’s sclerotic power structure, repre-
sented by his brother, Peter, who is also the
mayor. The village’s economy is reliant on its
“healing waters,” and large investments have
just been made in its municipal baths, the
212
better to draw tourists. Stockmann discov-
ers that the waters are poisoned—infected
by runoff from the tanneries upriver. At
first, the doctor has the press and the
working-class public on his side, but when
the costs of his proposed fixes become clear,
they turn on him. Cue pitchforks.
You can see why the story put Strong in
mind of the admirable scientists who began
warning of the catastrophic effects of car-
bon emissions decades ago. On the other
hand, I suggest to Strong, Stockmann cuts
a somewhat less noble figure. “Stockmann
is heroic, in certain ways, but he’s also an
egotist,” agrees Strong. “He’s unequivocal
in his certainty that he’s right, that no one
else has a valid argument. And he gets more
and more fixed in this identity as the lone
man versus the mob as the play goes on.”
Strong—and Gold and Herzog—are inter-
ested in exploring these nuances. “What
feels so resonant about the play today, in
these strange times,” Strong says, “is that it’s
about speaking truth to power—but it’s also
about what happens when people take sides,
and communication breaks down.”
As it happens, Gold wasn’t pitching a proj-
ect to Strong when he brought the play to
his attention. Gold had no intention of
staging An Enemy of the People; he’d simply
come across the text in the small library of
Ibsen-alia amassed by Herzog, his wife, in
preparation for her 2023 Broadway revival
of A Doll’s House, starring Jessica Chastain.
“It was sort of a, ‘Hey, check this out,’ ” says
Gold. “I saw a lot of Jeremy in the character
of Stockmann, a man who’s willing to sac-
rifice for the sake of his convictions. That
same commitment to truth is present in all
of Jeremy’s work.”
Call it crossed wires, or call it kismet.
Either way, those messages zapping back
and forth between friends planted a seed—
and in terrifically short order, the current
production was mustered. It helped that
Herzog, fresh off A Doll ’s House, already
knew how to shake the dust off an Ibsen the Square, and the theater was available
classic and that the principal creative trio for the exact dates he had free.” Circle in the
share deep bonds: Herzog and Strong Square presents work in the round, and that
met as undergraduates at Yale; Strong and 360-degree view is vital, Gold explains, for
Gold began collaborating early in their a play about competing perspectives. There’s
theater careers, teaming up for a 2010 off- the truth of fact, Stockmann’s truth, but there
Broadway production of the 18th-century are other truths too. The town’s economy
play The Coward; Gold and Herzog are, as would be hard hit by the baths’ closure. Jobs
previously noted, married. (Remarkably, An will be lost. And what about the polluting
Enemy of the People marks the spouses’ first tanneries? Must they be shut down? Forever?
production together.) Herzog gives such complexities airtime.
“I’ve never had the stars align this way,” It was important to her, for example, that
comments Gold. “Like, right after Jeremy the character of Peter, the mayor, not come
said he wanted to do it, I called Circle in across as a straw man or a totally cynical
 DRAMA SCHOOL
Director Sam Gold (left) is married to
playwright Amy Herzog (center), who
adapted An Enemy of the People; Herzog
and Strong met as undergraduates at
Yale. Gold wears Billy Reid and A.P.C.
Herzog in Proenza Schouler. Strong wears
P RO DUC ED BY BO OM P RO DUCT I ON S.
Loro Piana. Details, see In This Issue.
operator. Rather, he’s the political expo-
nent of the collective will to unknow, when
knowing threatens to unravel the fabric
of society. “His arguments have to carry
weight,” Herzog explains. “He has to believe
in the thing he’s protecting.”
“If you think back to when Ibsen was
writing, this science was new; it was like,
What’s a microbe?” explains Sopranos and
White Lotus star Michael Imperioli, who
plays the role of Peter. “He’s asking, ‘You
want me to stake the future of this town
on some invisible bugs?’ In that light, his
position is pretty reasonable.”
“It’s tricky, though,” says Strong. “Because
at the end of the day, Stockmann is right.
It’s not that he wants to bring this infor-
mation forward; he feels like he has to.” But
how do you do that, Strong goes on to ask,
at a moment like our own, when the whole
concept of “truth” is up for grabs? Gold,
Herzog, and Strong all bring up Naomi
Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror
World, in which the author launches her-
self into the orbit of anti-vaxxers, climate
change deniers, and election conspiracy
theorists. “History keeps repeating itself,”
says Gold. “This dynamic Ibsen lays out, it
recurs again and again. These ways we get
polarized. And all the reasons people will
look at someone armed with a set of cold,
hard facts, and say, ‘Well, that’s what you
believe. I believe something else.’ ”
C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 6 0
213
 The Menagerie
A childhood in war-torn Kosovo led Petrit Halilaj to make some
of the most exuberant, playful contemporary art around.
Dodie Kazanjian meets the optimist as he prepares for a major
installation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

ANIMAL FARM
Halilaj’s mantra is
coexistence, and this
extends to all manner
of flora and fauna.
Photographed here at
the Tate St. Ives in 2021
by Angela Suarez.
T
hrough art, I’ve always been
saving my life,” says Petrit
Halilaj. “It was always a way
out and a window to imag-
ination and dreaming and
telling stories.”
Born in 1986 in what was then Yugoslavia
and is now Kosovo, Halilaj was 13 when his
family home was burned to the ground by
Serbian troops; he and his family—he has
four younger siblings—were later placed
in an Albanian refugee camp. It was here
that a visiting Italian psychologist, Giacomo
“Angelo” Poli, gave drawing paper and felt-
tip pens to a group of kids and told them to
draw their fears and dreams. The 38 draw-
ings that Halilaj did in response—half of
them of birds in idyllic landscapes, the other
half of burning houses, tanks, and Serbian
soldiers with guns and bloody knives from
the massacres he had witnessed—eventually
fueled one of the most electrifying and
humanistic careers in contemporary art.
Halilaj is now a conceptual artist whose
seductive and often childlike sculptures,
drawings, installations, and performances
tell highly personal stories about a world
in which refugee crises, homelessness, and
wars are common occurrences. Since his
work appeared at the Berlin Biennale in
2010, Halilaj has represented Kosovo at the
Venice Biennale and had solo shows at the
New Museum in New York, the Hammer
Museum in Los Angeles, Tate St. Ives in
England, and many others around the world.
This month, he is installing a major project
on the roof garden of The Metropolitan
Museum of Art. When we connect, he has
just returned to his house in Berlin after a
week of teaching at the École Nationale
Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. (He
also lives and works in Pristina, the capital
of Kosovo, and in Italy.) A blond, slim, wiry
figure with a prominent nose, he speaks fast
and laughs often. Halilaj is not supposed to
discuss the Met project in advance, but his
enthusiasm for it brims over.
“Even if I cannot tell you exactly what
it will come there,” he says, in his volu-
ble but sometimes inscrutable English,
“what I’m bringing is more this sense of
building a personal map and trajectory
of my life and dreams and imagination
with reality. It’s actually coming from my
experience of the last two years, traveling
not only back to Kosovo, but to Albania,
Montenegro, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia,
Serbia, all these countries that I was very
scared of before.” He began this journey in
Albania, where his refugee camp had been,
and continued with many visits to schools
 “It’s rare to find art (and an artist) that
is at once bitingly critical and unabashedly
hopeful,” says curator Elena Filipovic
in small towns. “I thought knowing more
people and more places in the region will
help me to heal and see a possible togeth-
erness. The wars showed how unrespected
many minorities were. And I feel that,
through culture, we can bring people to a
new conversation.” He tells me he’s col-
lecting “an ensemble of sculptures that will
216
come f rom very different backgrounds”
for The Met’s roof garden. “They will sus-
tain each other sculpturally, blend together
in kind of a chorus that makes a new song.”
The exhibition, which he was invited to
take on by Sheena Wagstaff, head of mod-
ern and contemporary art at The Met until a
year ago, opens on April 30, and will be there
TAKE FLIGHT
clockwise from top left: An installation at the
Museo Tamayo in Mexico City in 2023; at the Tate
St. Ives in 2021; an original drawing made by Halilaj
in a refugee camp in Albania when he was a child.
TO P RI G HT: © P E T RI T HA LI LA J. P H OTO © TAT E ( MAT T G REE N WO O D) . BOT TOM : P E TR I T H ALILAJ, OR IGINAL D RAWINGS
TO P LE FT: P H OTO G RA P HY BY G ERA RD O LA N DA A ND EDUA RD O LÓ P E Z (G LR EST UD I O) . COURTESY OF MUSEO TAMAYO.
for much of the year. “The story Petrit is tell-
ing is always his story, but it’s also our soci-
ety’s story,” Max Hollein, The Met’s director,
tells me. “He gives you a very emotional
and individual experience and, through
his art, makes it something that a whole
generation can relate to. And that makes
it extremely powerful.”
FRO M T HE KU KËS I I CA MP, 19 9 9, FE LT-T I P P EN O N PA P ER . © P E TR IT HA L IL A J.
G
rowing up in the small village
of Runik in northern Kosovo,
Halilaj could draw before he
could talk. He could sketch
two pictures at once, using
both hands, and he got a
lot of attention for it. Kosovo had lost its
autonomy in the late 1980s, when Serbian
dictator Slobodan Milosevic seized control.
The Albanian majority in Kosovo, to which
the Halilaj family belonged, was persecuted
and forced “to live in parallel systems, hid-
den and underground,” he remembers. It was
dangerous for Halilaj and his four younger
siblings to play in public spaces or even go
to school. His family and all the other ethnic
Albanians in the region were systematically
 forced out of the country. “My house was
T RAV ES Í A CUAT RO, MA DR I D/ ME X I CO C IT Y/GUA DA LA JA RA . P HOTO: G E RDAST U D IO. BOTTOM R IGH T: PETR IT H ALILAJ & ÁLVARO UR BANO,

burned in early ’98, then my grandparents’

W H AT CO M ES F I RST, 2 80 X 2 20 X 2 20 CM , RESI N , C E ME NT, M ETA L, WO O D, A L I V E C HI CKENS. © PETR IT H ALILAJ & ÁLVARO UR BANO.
TO P RI G HT: COU RT ESY O F TH E A RTI STS A ND CHE RTLÜ DD E , B ERL IN ; KU RI M A NZUTTO, MEXICO CITY/NEW YOR K; MENNOUR , PAR IS;

house in early ’99. They imprisoned my

father and all the other men in surrounding
villages, and then we were forced to walk for
days until we finally arrived in Albania. We
ended up in refugee camps in Kukës, one
of the first cities after you cross the border.”
It was a grim and dull environment, but
Halilaj “found a lot of happiness” with his
brothers and sisters because of their mother’s
love and creative imagination. “My mom has
an artist’s mind,” he tells me. (Their father
had been a cartographer; their mother made
clothes for women on her home sewing
machine.) This is where Halilaj met Angelo,
the Italian psychologist, who encouraged
him to make drawings. “The way he talked
to us, he was really able to make us share
experiences,” Halilaj remembers, “which is
the beginning of healing after a trauma.”
Angelo was only there for two weeks, but
when he left Halilaj wrote to him, and
Angelo, who saw his talent and had kept
all his drawings, wrote back. They cor-
responded for several years. When Kofi
Annan, the then secretary-general of the
United Nations, visited Halilaj’s refugee
camp, Halilaj showed him a large drawing
of a child watching a massacre. “I made it to
ask Kofi to stop the war,” he tells me. The
scene was captured on Albanian television.
HATCH AN IDEA
top: An installation Halilaj mounted
with his husband, Álvaro Urbano, in Venice
in 2023. above: Another work by Halilaj and
Urbano, What Comes First, from 2015.
When the war ended, Halilaj and his
family returned to Kosovo and struggled
to restart their lives. Halilaj went to an art
school in nearby Peja, a larger town, where
he fell in love with painting, sculpture, and
art history. He longed to study in Italy, and
talked about this in the letters he was still
writing to Angelo. When Halilaj was 17,
Angelo and his wife invited him to come
and live with them and their 20-year-old
daughter. For the next four years, Halilaj
attended the Brera Academy of Fine Art
in Milan and stayed with Angelo and his
family on weekends.
He also came out as gay. “I knew I was
gay,” he says, “but I never could tell any-
one in Kosovo. I never saw two gay men in
Kosovo together. But in Milan, there was a
whole community.” The world of contem-
porary culture opened up to him in Italy,
not just visual art but literature and cinema,
especially Pasolini and Fellini. He went to
Turin and discovered arte povera through
the work of Alighiero Boetti, Mario Merz,
and Marisa Merz. He remembers think-
ing, “Wow, you can use all these materials
that come from reality to express how we
understand the world. I don’t want to do

217
 In 2011, the artist
Álvaro Urbano danced up
to Halilaj at a club and
said, “Are you the chicken
guy?” Nine years later,
they married in a joyous
celebration in
their studio and home

just painting. I want to tell stories through

everything you have around.”
In 2010, having graduated from Brera
Academy and moved to Berlin, Halilaj par-
ticipated in the Berlin Biennale. It was his
debut show on the global stage. When he
learned that he’d be given a budget of about
30,000 euros for his Biennale contribution,
he realized he could use part of the money
to help build the house that his parents
dreamed of having in Pristina, in order to
give their younger children better educa-
tional opportunities. The piece he made for
the Biennale was a life-size replica, a ghost
image of the framework of their long-lost
house. It was exhibited with live chickens
roaming around and through it, just as they
had been back in Halilaj’s childhood home,
and it bore one of his long poetic titles: The
places I’m looking for, my dear, are utopian
places, they are boring and I don’t know how
to make them real. The actual Pristina house
was eventually finished by his parents. “My
parents currently live in it,” he says, “and my
four siblings were also there until they moved
out.” Elena Filipovic, who curated a Halilaj
show at Wiels Contemporary Art Center in
Brussels in 2013, describes his Berlin exhi-
bition as “not art imitating life or even the
inverse, but real life made into an art form.”
Chickens have played a large part in
Halilaj’s art and life. “I talked to chickens
as a chicken, in their language, when I was
a kid,” he says. For a group show in Istanbul
in 2008, he lived with chickens in a house
he had built in a children’s playground. (The
piece is titled They are Lucky to be Bourgeois
Hens.) And he began his ongoing drawing
ME N NOU R, PA R IS ; CHE RT LÜ D D E , B ER LI N .

series of Bourgeois Hens—pencil sketches of

SU BLI M I NA L . COU RT ESY T HE A RTI ST,
© P E TR I T H A LI LA J. P HOTO : I MAG EN

fowl with a regal manner—in 2009. Hali- SOLAR POWERED

laj’s mantra is coexistence. He wasn’t allowed A view of the
exhibition “To a raven
to bring live chickens to “Runik,” his current and hurricanes that
show at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, from unknown places
where he has reinstalled his Berlin Biennale bring back smells of
ghost house. Instead, he brought 50 exam- humans in love,”
Museo Reina Sofía—
ples of the birds and creatures and costumes Palacio de Cristal,
that he had made C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 6 0 Madrid, 2020–2021.

218
Painstaking preparation,
and a dose of actorly
alchemy, transformed
Kingsley Ben-Adir into
a reggae icon for the
film Bob Marley: One
Love. By Marley Marius.
Photographed by
Norman Jean Roy.

Catch a Fire
 POSITIVE
VIBRATION
Actors Kingsley
Ben-Adir and
Lashana Lynch,
who costar in
Bob Marley: One
Love, both wear
Bottega Veneta.
Fashion Editor:
Eric McNeal.
 Y
ou’d be forgiven for not quite
knowing where you’ve seen
Kingsley Ben-Adir before. He
was, for years, a steady presence
on the London stage, doing A
Midsummer Night’s Dream in
Regent’s Park, Much Ado About Nothing at the Old
Vic, and new dramas including Gillian Slovo’s
The Riots at the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn and
Arinze Kene’s God’s Property at the Soho Theatre.
But his work in television and film has been qui-
eter, characterized by mostly supporting parts in
projects like Peaky Blinders, The OA, High Fidel-
ity, and, last year, Marvel’s Secret Invasion and
Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. (It was little more than
instinct that pulled him away from the theater; in
2014, against his then agent’s advice, Ben-Adir
declined an offer to make his West End debut in
Shakespeare in Love, determined, he says, that he
should “get some camera experience.”)
Yet it feels strange to call the 37-year-old
a character actor—not only because of his
marquee-idol good looks and reedy six-foot-two
frame, but also because, over the past few years,
SUN IS SHINING
Ben-Adir has developed a knack for playing Great Men. In 2020,
above: A still from Bob Marley: One Love, in theaters February 14.
shortly after appearing as Barack Obama in Showtime’s The Comey opposite: Ben-Adir wears a Gucci by Sabato De Sarno jacket, shirt, and pants.
Rule, he popped up again as Malcolm X in Regina King’s One Night In this story: hair, Nai’vasha; makeup, Jessica Smalls. Details, see In This Issue.
in Miami…, a part that won him the Gotham Award for break-
through actor. (“I was like, ‘I didn’t know you could get nominated
for breakthrough work at 34,’” he joked at the time.) teenage years in northwest London, as the late 1990s turned into the
Ben-Adir continues the theme this winter with Bob Marley: One early aughts, when he was beginning to fall in love with performance.
Love, starring as the iconic Jamaican reggae singer, songwriter, and “There were certain films and TV shows that kept making me cry,”
Rastafarian opposite Lashana Lynch as Marley’s wife, Rita. Narrow- he says. Once, for, “like, a friend’s friend’s birthday,” Ben-Adir was
ing its focus to an especially turbulent chapter in his life, the film cap- dragged along to see In America, Jim Sheridan’s 2002 drama about
tures Marley’s near assassination in Kingston in 1976; his subsequent a poor Irish family making a go of it in New York City. Quite to his
flight to Europe, where he recorded and toured Exodus, his ninth surprise, “I just remember jamming, just being transfixed with his
studio album, in 1977; and then his triumphant return to Jamaica for relationship with the small girl…and then Paddy Considine, at the
the One Love Peace Concert in April 1978—an event attended by end when he’s saying goodbye to Frankie…I could not stop crying.”
over 30,000 people. (A few years later, in 1981, Marley would die from He’d experienced something similar with Good Will Hunting (“It
melanoma at 36.) King Richard’s Reinaldo Marcus Green directs, with moved me”), and then, at about 16, when he was asked to prepare a
Rita and two of her children, Ziggy and Cedella, aboard as producers. scene from A Raisin in the Sun at his secondary school. “I just ran-
The part was so plum—and seemed so absolutely wrong for domly got thrown into a drama class at that age because of being not
him—that at first, Ben-Adir thought going up for it would be a academic,” he explains. “A lot of kids who were on the edge of being
waste of time. “Years ago you’d get sent an audition and you’d start expelled got thrown into drama.” Well, whatever was meant to hap-

CH I A BE LLA JA M ES. © 2023 PA RA M OU NT P I CTU RES. A LL RI G HTS R ES ERV E D.

going, There’s no point in me taping for this, because Leonardo
DiCaprio is going to play it,” he says. “You can start smelling the
sense of, This is kind of too good.” And, anyway, Ben-Adir couldn’t
really sing, he couldn’t really dance, he definitely couldn’t play the
guitar, and he’d recently bulked up to 215 pounds for Secret Invasion.
“I’m like, Anything I do is just going to put them off.”
But the stakes changed when he saw an early version of King
Richard, and understood that the Marley family would be watching
his tape right away. “So then there’s a kind of pressure to it,” he
says, flashing a sly smile. “There’s a bit of danger. So I thought,
What’s the harm?”
It’s always been about a feeling for Ben-Adir. Also, often, tears.
We are at the Manhattan offices of Paramount Pictures, in a com-
fortable (if oddly oblong) room behind the studio’s private theater.
Dressed in a marled blue quarter-zip sweater and tan joggers, a tiny
gold hoop winking discreetly from one ear, he is vividly describing his
pen to him there, did: “I remember reading one of the speeches—I
can’t remember what it is, it was so long ago—and choking up.” Ben-
Adir would eventually enroll at London’s Guildhall School of Music
& Drama—which counts Daniel Craig, Orlando Bloom, Damian
Lewis, and Michaela Coel among its alumni—graduating in 2011.
In Ziggy’s telling, it was also “just a feeling” that compelled his
family to throw their weight behind a narrative film about Bob Marley.
(Ziggy had previously served as an executive producer on Marley, the
acclaimed 2012 documentary by Kevin Macdonald, in which he, Rita,
and Cedella had also all participated.) “We took a step to try and get
it done,” he says. “But the funny thing is, for us, everything works out
the way it should work out. We live with that spiritual kind of rule.”
If one can submit to serendipity while also maintaining vertigi-
nous standards, then that’s the sensibility that governed the project
more broadly: The Marleys—and Paramount—took as much time
as they needed to get One Love exactly right. (This June will mark
six years since the film was announced.) C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 6 1

222
PRO DUCE D BY CA NVAS PRO DUCT IO N . S ET D ESI G N : V I K I RU TSC H. HA I RCUT BY CHA Z H AZ LI TT.
Family
Ties
At the end of her first year as Dior
CEO, Delphine Arnault is proving to
be a powerful protector of legacy—
and a leader poised to make waves.
By Gaby Wood. Photographed by
Annie Leibovitz.

PLACE AT THE TABLE

Arnault, wearing Dior, at Dior’s under-
renovation flagship in Manhattan.
“It made you dream,” she says
of visiting Dior at 30 Montaigne in
Paris with her father as a girl.
Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman.
 O
 the morning of February 1 last year, imperturb- asymmetrical white shirt collars. There’s an occasional kinky touch
ably recovered from a party to mark her departure from strappy black gladiator boots with kitten heels and pearl but-
from Louis Vuitton, Delphine Arnault stepped tons. There’s a cotton dress made of many different kinds of lace, and
into her new office in Paris as chairman and CEO a blurred, X-ray-like projection of the Eiffel Tower on a black coat.
of Christian Dior. The eldest child and only “How many looks do you have?” Delphine asks.
daughter of Bernard Arnault—who is, more often “Seventy-eight,” Maria Grazia replies. “Because Rachele cut five.”
than not, the richest man in the world—she had moved up through Maria Grazia’s 27-year-old daughter and cultural adviser, Rachele
the ranks of her father’s companies at LVMH over the course of Regini, is behind us, readying the models and overseeing operations.
a couple of decades, quietly absorbing every aspect of the fash- “Isn’t she a bit too skinny for this one?” Maria Grazia wonders out
ion business. Now here she was, at 47, with the crown jewel in loud, about one of the models. She turns to Delphine: “I’m obsessed.
her hands: the first fashion house her father had ever bought, the I don’t want to show too-skinny girls. I want healthy girls.” Then,
place where he had taken her at weekends as a child, the home of quietly: “It’s an intense week for you, huh, Delphine?”
the much-loved Monsieur Dior (as its employees still call him), Indeed it is. Five days earlier, Delphine and her partner, Xavier
who, 77 years ago, changed the way women dreamed about their Niel—with whom she has two young children—had attended a din-
lives. Christian Dior is a name inextricably linked to the history ner at the Palace of Versailles for the King and Queen of the United
of France—and on that day Delphine Arnault became the first Kingdom (Queen Camilla was dressed by Dior; the French first lady,
woman ever to be in charge. Brigitte Macron, was dressed by Vuitton). Delphine wore an embroi-
Not long afterward she called her friend Larry Gagosian in New dered wool haute couture coat with a floor-length gown in lace and
York. “Larry,” she said, “I’ve got this big office. But it’s lonely up here!” champagne-colored crushed silk. Tomorrow she will be speaking for
Being a member of the Arnault family, while companionable in the first time to 600 delegates invited to a Dior Summit at the Lou-
many respects, carries its own form of isolation. Close-knit and vre, a few floors beneath the Mona Lisa. The same spring-summer
very private, the Arnaults have been subject to increased public runway show will be put on for them, and they’ll be entertained with
attention since their patriarch parceled out talks, parties, and dinners over the next cou-
decision-making responsibilities over the ple of days. “It’s great for them,” Delphine
future of LVMH to his five children (via “He never stops,” she says says, “and I think it’s important.”
a holding company where they each have a of her father. “Seeing that as
20 percent stake). “When you grow up in a At dusk, Delphine and I walk a couple of
well-known family, you don’t have the right a child forms quite an blocks under her ample umbrella to the
to make any mistakes,” Delphine’s brother impression—the dedication Dior boutique, where the delegates to the
Antoine explains. “People look out for the following day’s symposium have gathered
slightest flaw.” he gives to his work” for welcome drinks. She marvels at Maria
I first meet Delphine Arnault seven Grazia’s calm organization. John Galliano
months into her reign at Dior, in the lobby of creative direc- and Raf Simons, she recalls, would be up all night on the eve of a
tor Maria Grazia Chiuri’s studio in Paris. Discreet in demeanor, runway show, panicking and remaking things, whereas Maria Grazia
fragile-featured, with a composure to match her impressive nearly is always done on time. (“I think it’s very important not only for me,
six-foot height, Delphine greets me in a navy Dior trouser suit, her but also for the people who work with me, to have time for their
hands in its pockets. It’s the eve of the spring-summer 2024 show, personal life,” Maria Grazia tells me later. “It’s nice for everybody to
and in the studio three black leather seats have been arranged in have dinner at home.”)
front of a sample of the neon pink and yellow set. Models are walk- The original site of Christian Dior’s 1947 debut is 30 Avenue
ing back and forth, small adjustments made, accessories considered. Montaigne—or “Trente Montaigne” for short. Extensively remod-
Tiny turrets of strawberries and raspberries are laid out before us. eled, it reopened in its new incarnation in March 2022. And that’s
Maria Grazia, clad in jeans and a black sweater, sits next to Delphine not the only sign of a company expanding at speed. There are store
and introduces a little gray poodle, whose color, they both note with directors from all over the world here—“the heart and soul” of the
a smile, is perfectly on brand. “It’s gris Dior,” Maria Grazia says. company, as Delphine will tell them. They haven’t been brought
If, in 1947, Christian Dior was telling a story about women’s together since before COVID, and since then Dior has created
lives—the war they’d emerged from, the future they hoped for— more than 6,600 jobs. One million of their iconic Lady Dior bags
then the first two women to lead his company are telling a new one. have been sold.
With Delphine as CEO and Maria Grazia as creative director, the The delegates are here so they can feel part of something both
house of Dior is moving into an era in which two busy working venerable and new—and keep sales on target. More than 40 lan-
mothers are in a position to determine what women wear, how they guages are spoken among them. Delphine greets as many people as
feel, and how the people who make the clothes feel too. In Maria she can, traveling through the US, Mexico, Southern Europe, and
Grazia’s view, “fashion has to help you to feel that you’re free.” As Japan in the space of a few minutes. She asks what is and isn’t selling,
Marie-Josée Kravis, a family friend who has sat on the board of which celebrities young people look up to in different zones, who
LVMH for 13 years, observes, “Here you have two really talented are the competing brands? And then, always: How is the Lady Dior
women who are living the message daily. I think it’s a great example bag doing? The price was increased globally in July. Is it too high
for women everywhere.” for their particular market?
As the clothes appear, Delphine and Maria Grazia settle into Meanwhile, there are rowdy whoops from the selfie-taking
each other’s company with ease. Delphine absorbs, never intervenes. crowd—a giant Dior school reunion. The Korean delegation has
She has seen this collection in progress twice before. “Every time gathered for a photo on the new glass staircase designed by Peter
you see it you get to know it a little better,” she tells me. Dior’s Marino. They invite Delphine to join them, and she gamely takes
1947 New Look is reflected in black pleated skirts and refracted in her place at the center of the group.

226
 S
ome weeks later, Delphine and I have lunch at Le Stresa, “I’ve never rebelled,” she says, smiling at the obvious question.
a small, family-run Italian restaurant on a side street Asked if there is a Harry Windsor in the Arnault family, she says, “I
near the Avenue Montaigne. It’s a favorite among the hope not!”—and her friends have certainly never heard her say she
fashion and film crowds and is packed with models and wants to do anything else. Like her father, Delphine has an instinct
moguls during Fashion Week. “I love this place because for what will sell. Some, but not all, of this comes from experience.
it’s kind of homey,” Delphine says as she greets one “It’s not a rational thing,” she explains; in fact, the only professional
of the brothers on duty. We’ve just spent an hour at the recently challenge she identifies in the course of our lunchtime conversation
rehoused Dior archive, sighing over vintage shoes rescued from flea is that it can be hard to predict, when hiring people, whether they
markets and drawers full of original sketches by Christian Dior will have this knack. It’s her father’s gift: “When he sees 15 bags on
and Yves Saint Laurent. Not for the first time, she told her driver the table, he immediately goes to the bag that’s going to sell,” she
that we would walk. With her usual elongated elegance, Delphine tells me in amused amazement.
is wearing a cropped cream bouclé jacket with CD logo buttons Delphine is clearly, by nature, a listener—“all ears, all the time,”
over black wool trousers and a white slogan T-shirt that alludes to as one of her friends put it. This unflashy quality may be her great-
Édith Piaf. She orders a caprese salad with a minestrone soup, and a est strength, and it marks her as unusual in the very male echelons
conversation emerges around her finely of LVMH: staunch and sensitive in her
tuned sense of privacy. support of creative people, the originator
The puzzle of speaking to Delphine of a prize for young designers, a proven
Arnault is this: She is palpably friendly spotter of talent. If there is a jeopardy at
but relatively silent. In the course of Dior, it’s that it must never fail to lead
several conversations with her, I didn’t the creative field, and in that respect Del-
get the sense that her brief answers to phine is poised to steer it without ego.
my questions were a mark of hauteur
or even reticence; though she may have Brutal in business, relentlessly hard-
been wary of being interviewed, she working, and firm as a father, Bernard
gave me a number of opportunities to Arnault is known as “the wolf in cash-
observe her world. It was more that she mere.” In 2022 he persuaded the LVMH
seemed not to have a narrative rela- board to raise the mandatory retirement
tionship to her own life: Nothing came age for the chief executive and chair-
out as a story. This is, perhaps, a form man from 75 to 80. That now gives him
of modesty, and the modesty in turn another five years to oversee his five
a mark of politeness. One thing that children. Unless they get unanimous
emerged repeatedly in my conversations board approval, they cannot sell their
with others—aside from the Arnaults’ shares in the company for another 30
tireless work ethic—was that they have years, and, after that, they can only pass
very good manners. “Delphine has a them on to Arnault’s direct descendants.
form of reserve that I find extremely The image of sibling unity, while by all
touching,” Antoine Arnault tells me. accounts accurate, is also a response to
“Some confuse this with arrogance. My a potential vulnerability: Arnault has
sister is very discreet by nature, and the taken over companies previously owned
education we received obviously nur- by warring families.
tured this discretion.” When she acts, MAKING AN ENTRANCE Though he has repeatedly said it’s
he says, she acts thoughtfully: “At 25 Delphine, then 16, with Bernard Arnault backstage not automatic that a child of his should
it’s called shyness, at 50 it’s maturity.” at Paris Fashion Week, 1991. succeed him at the helm of LVMH (it
With me Delphine was at her liveliest is “not an obligation, nor inevitable,” he
when praising others, whether it was the recently told The New York Times), it’s
artists whose work she owns or the shop assistant at Dior who’d been presumed that one of them will eventually take his place. Who that
there for decades and had recently broken her foot. Her affection becomes will depend in part on who actually wants the job: Arnault
and admiration for her father were equally evident. One person I has likened it, tellingly, to a priesthood. Once a month, the father
spoke to described the father-daughter pair as having “deep respect” and foreman gathers his children for a 90-minute working lunch
for one another. on the top floor of the LVMH headquarters at 22 Avenue Mon-
I came to think of Delphine as a relative of Henry James’s taigne. “He’s involved us from when we were quite young,” Delphine
BE RT RA N D RI ND O FF P E TRO FF/G ET T Y I M AG ES.

fictional Maisie: the eldest child of divorced parents who is pre- explains. “He talks to us about the group strategy, discusses questions
cociously attuned to what the adults ignore. Sidney Toledano, Del- that arise. He’s always wanted to pass on his knowledge. It’s a lot of
phine’s mentor at Dior, speaks of her resilience (“Don’t think life work to choose the houses one buys carefully.”
was easy,” he says mysteriously). A photograph of her with her Now encompassing more than 70 brands, the LVMH Moët
father, taken when she was 16, portrays them as an echo of each Hennessy Louis Vuitton group is, as Delphine puts it, “the lead-
other—Delphine, almost at Arnault’s height, has a sweetness of ing business in Europe.” In fact it’s the largest luxury conglomer-
expression that makes her look closer to 12. “I think we all forget ate in the world, encompassing not only fashion labels but hotels,
that she was rather young, still an early teenager, when her father vineyards, a world-class art museum, and a huge amount of very
really built LVMH,” Kravis observes, “and her father is a very good profitable Champagne. Dior’s significance within this empire is
teacher. She’s grown up with the company.” not merely sentimental: It controls 41.4 percent of LVMH. The

227
 I
luxury company plays a heritage role, and an ambassadorial one too: t was a very healthy, calm lifestyle, centered on studies and
Arnault pledged 200 million euros to the restoration of Notre-Dame sport,” Delphine reflects, of her childhood. “We weren’t
cathedral and is sponsoring this year’s Paris Olympics to the tune of allowed to go out much. I mean, a little, but it was all about
150 million euros. French economists have deemed him to be more working hard. We’d always seen our father working hard—and
powerful than a head of state. my grandfather. He was at the office on Saturday mornings—
His daughter, in a more quiet way, contributes too—to French they worked together. Sometimes I’d go with them.”
schools. “I work a lot with education,” she tells me when I ask about Arnault was born into a family construction business in Roubaix,
causes she supports. “It’s something I do personally with specific northern France. His parents married the same year Christian Dior
schools that I know, who identify very good talents. Students who unveiled his New Look, and three years later his maternal grandfather
are super bright and don’t have money to pay for a scholarship, things handed the reins of the business to his father. Arnault was just 26
like that.” It’s not something she talks about publicly. when Delphine was born. He was married then to his first wife, Anne
The dynasty’s wealth has made them an object of some hostility Dewavrin, who was also from the north of France. Delphine has
in certain quarters of a country founded on the principle of “égal- early memories of her mother’s wardrobe in Roubaix: “She had a ’70s
ité”: Last April protesters stormed LVMH headquarters with smoke look with long skirts and boots. A bit Céline,” she says. Delphine and
bombs during long-running strikes over the national retirement age. her younger brother Antoine were “raised with very strict principles,”
Delphine’s response to this is apparent bafflement and hurt, along Kravis tells me. Famously, Arnault would help his children with math
with protectiveness of the staff. “That, sadly, had nothing to do with before dinner. Delphine’s friend Almine Rech—a gallerist who sold
LVMH,” she says, shaking her head. “They were railway workers. It Delphine her first painting—adds: “The more advantages you have,
was intrusive and violent—for no reason. I found it quite frighten- the more you have to prove: That’s how you are brought up in France.”
ing that they could come into the LVMH Though like all siblings she and An-
headquarters—there were staff who were toine would bicker a lot, as the eldest,
trapped and inhaled a lot of smoke.” Delphine was expected to set an example.
Although the Arnaults’ Shakespearean “Delph” was a studious child who en-
drama has drawn international atten- joyed math and economics especially. In
tion, under French law the redistribu- fact, she was always so well-behaved that
tive gesture of their patriarch is almost Antoine couldn’t quite believe it when
prosaic. Legally, you have to leave assets he caught her smoking a cigarette out of
to your children and couldn’t disinherit her window at 16. She insists that she has
them even if you wanted to. So while no creative streak. “When I play Piction-
the intrigue over who will emerge at ary,” she says, “no one wants to play with
the top remains, the primary interest in me!” She was also keen on tennis—as an
the Arnaults is not so much familial as adult she has played with Roger Federer
national. Who will be the custodians of and his wife, but it was paddle tennis….
these slices of French history, and the As Antoine remarks wryly: “Despite her
guardians of its future economy? perseverance, I have to admit that she
As the CEO of Dior, Delphine is the is less gifted than the Williams sisters!”
protector of a myth. Everything about The Arnault children were brought up to
it—the original gray-and-white color be competitive: “Just, you know, trying
scheme, the oval-backed chairs, the TWO OF A KIND to do your best,” Delphine says. “That’s
references to the New Look, the fabric Delphine with her younger brother what you do—of course being very con-
printed with a map of the streets around Antoine Arnault in Paris, 2011. siderate of others, but always trying to
the shop—is designed to inspire the do the best you can do.”
sense that if you buy anything by Dior you will own a piece of his- “That sounds exhausting,” I suggest.
tory. When Maria Grazia looks back to her arrival at Dior seven Delphine laughs. “Yeah. It is exhausting!”
years ago, she realizes how wrong she was to think of it as a fashion She remembers fondly the three less-driven years they spent in the
label like any other. “In Paris, Dior is not a brand. It’s much more, US, living in New Rochelle, New York, while her father attempted
because it’s part of the history of Paris and of the French,” she to set up a US branch of the family real estate business. “It was a
explains. “For me it was initially very difficult to understand this Franco-American school, so half the classes were in French and half
because I came from Italy, and we don’t have this kind of relationship in English. I think American school is less pressurized, so it was fun.”
with fashion.” This was reinforced by the globe-traveling exhibition The family returned to France when Delphine was 10, by which time
“Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams” and by the republication she was fully bilingual.
MI C HE L DUFOUR /W I RE I MAG E /G E T TY IM AG ES.

of Christian Dior’s autobiography, Dior by Dior (which Delphine It was around then that her father made his first acquisition: a
recently reread and found to be the template for everything that company that included the house of Dior. “He’s always had a par-
followed). The expansion of 30 Montaigne now includes the Galerie ticular affection for it,” Delphine says. “He had this vision very early
Dior, where the changing room used by Dior’s original models has on: to make Dior the most desirable brand in the world—along with
been reconstructed to look as though those ’50s women had just Vuitton!” she adds quickly. At the time, the company that owned
stepped out to lunch. Even a star-shaped piece of metal that the very Dior was in bankruptcy. There were, Delphine says, “five Dior
superstitious Monsieur Dior found on a sidewalk has been exhibited shops.” Now there are 245. Arnault took Delphine to 30 Montaigne
behind glass, as if it were a Roman relic. straight away. “I was pretty awestruck,” she recalls. “It was fascinating
“Dior is the most famous French name in the world,” Delphine for a small girl to arrive at Dior—to see all those dresses, the bags,
says confidently. the hats…. It made you dream.”

228
 GREAT STRIDES
Delphine in Dior,
in Manhattan in
November 2023.
In this story: hair,
Braydon Nelson;
makeup, Francelle
Daly. Details,
see In This Issue.
I suggest that must have given her quite a bit to talk about with
her school friends. Immediately, the family modesty takes over, as
if shutting a door. “We didn’t speak about that,” she says quickly.
That first visit to Dior was the beginning of a long-standing
habit: Arnault went on to take his children into stores every Sat-
urday, paving the way for the sorts of trips he makes with Del-
phine now. “When I go to Asia with him, as I have several times
this year,” she says, “we spend a week visiting a huge number of
shops.” These tours are like celebrity appearances—Arnault is
often delightedly mobbed in China. On their most recent visit, she
reports, laughing a little, “we visited 250 shops in five cities, walked
P RO DUC ED BY A L ST U D I O. SE T D ESI G N : M A RY H OWA RD ST U DI O.
an average of 15,000 steps per day, were on our feet for 16 hours a
day, in 95-degree heat. He never stops. Seeing that as a child forms
quite an impression—the dedication he gives to his work.”
When she was 15, her parents divorced, and Arnault married the
Canadian concert pianist Hélène Mercier. (Arnault also plays clas-
sical piano, and the children were brought up to do that too, though
Delphine claims, once again, to have no creative talent.) Arnault and
Mercier went on to have three sons together—Alexandre, Frédéric,
and Jean. The latter two were taught literature by the future first
lady Brigitte Macron, who remains a good friend of Delphine’s.
Dewavrin—“Mamoune” to her grandchildren—has since married
Patrice De Maistre, the former wealth manager of Liliane Betten-
court. Antoine observes that Delphine is like their mother “in her
altruistic and pleasure-seeking character. Both of them cultivate the
French ‘art de vivre’ and a remarkable sense of family.”
At 17, Delphine sold perfume at Dior, before going to the London
School of Economics and to business school in Lille. She was given
her first Louis Vuitton bag at 18—a Noé. Though she worked at
McKinsey for a couple of years after graduating, she was always bound
for the family firm. As Toledano puts it, she “has Dior in her blood.”
Delphine Arnault’s sense of humor tends toward irony. “Her humor
has a nice bite to it,” Gagosian comments, “but she’s never mean.”
Long-term collaborators have benefited from the scale of her vision,
the nuance in her approach and the mischief in her smile. She’s
passionate about contemporary artists—their lives as much as their
work—and has brought them into the fold with great commitment.
She has a fearless relationship to risk, but is more moderate and ana-
lytical in her thinking than many in the fashion world, who rely on
impulse or intuition. Beneath her sleek exterior, she is a woman who
gets to work and gets the joke. Rech reminds me that the Arnaults
are from the north of France. As a result, she says, the family sense
of humor is basically British.
Delphine’s first job within LVMH after graduating was with John
Galliano in 2000. She was 25. Galliano was at Dior but also working
on his JG label out of an old doll factory in the 11th arrondissement—
that’s where Delphine began. At the time, they were reviewing the
brand’s graphic identity, and Delphine helped Galliano find graphic
designers, manufacturers, and suppliers. Very quickly, Galliano
remembers, she could see what he was looking for: “a sense of irony.
Sometimes that doesn’t work in France. C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 6 2
229
Has the sun set on the
evening dress? Spring
runways offered a
lighter, brighter vision
for formal dressing—
one hinged on daring
silhouettes, lots of
embellishments, and
an all-in joie de vivre
that rejects the stuffy
and stilted. Bring it
on! Photographed by
Campbell Addy.

Night Shift
 SHINING EXAMPLES
Model Adut Akech cuts an
appealingly textured
figure in a boxy Max Mara
jacket (maxmara.com)
and JW Anderson skirt
(jwanderson.com for
information). opposite:
Akech makes a long
story short, matching her
Dolce & Gabbana shirt
(select Dolce & Gabbana
boutiques) to a spangled
vest and shorts from
Stella McCartney
(stellamccartney.com).
Fashion Editor: Max Ortega.
232
 COUPLES RETREAT
above: Akech’s top and pants from Rabanne
(net-a-porter.com) make a narrow, neutral palette the
stuff of dreams. Her partner, model Samuel Elkhier,
wears an Ouer polo; ouer.studio. left: Akech wears
Louis Vuitton; select Louis Vuitton boutiques.
Elkhier wears a Givenchy jacket and top; givenchy
.com. Hermès pants; Hermès boutiques.

233
SHEER PERFECTION
Have we discovered,
in this diaphanous
delight from Giorgio
Armani (armani.com),
the ne plus ultra of
going-out tops? (We’d
venture a resounding
yes.) Optic white
Schiaparelli pants
(Maison Schiaparelli,
21 place Vendôme
75001, Paris) provide
a grounding force.

234
 WALKING ON
SUNSHINE
All fun, no fuss:
A jaunty Gucci dress
and easy, breezy
jeans (gucci.com)
give Akech plenty
to smile about.
 GROUND RULES
above: Ralph Lauren Collection shirt
and skirt; ralphlauren.com. Dior Fine Jewelry
earrings. left: Akech takes shimmering,
glimmering cover against the growing dark in
a Michael Kors Collection top and skirt;
michaelkors.com. Proenza Schouler shoes.
In this story: hair, Lacy Redway; makeup,
Yadim Carranza. Details, see In This Issue.
PRO DUC E D BY V I EW FI N D E RS.

237
Maximum
Capacity
Long a source of quiet shame,
the big, messy bag has
been reclaimed as a marker
of modern womanhood.
Emily Ratajkowski gives a
few of them a real-world
stress test. Photographed by
Larissa Hofmann.

ONE WITH
EVERYTHING
Traveling light? Think
the opposite of that:
Ratajkowski fills up
and steps out with a
gloriously capacious
holdall (and some
boots that hold their
own). Bag from Loewe;
loewe.com. Gucci
jacket. All-In boots.
Fashion Editor:
Alex Harrington.
OPEN FOR BUSINESS
It’s in there somewhere—
she just knows it!
Ratajkowski plumbs
the depths of her
mega Coach bag; coach
.com. Miu Miu top,
skirt, briefs, and belt.
241
 SQUARE DEAL
A tidy little
Fendi tote (fendi
.com) splits the
difference between
cool discretion
and big, bold
statement-making.
242
KEEP IT MOVING
Meltdown? What
meltdown? With a
sturdy Ferragamo
bag in her grip, there
isn’t a thing that
Ratajkowski can’t
handle; ferragamo
.com. Loewe top,
shorts, and shoe.
 CARRIED AWAY
Have earbuds,
a change of shoes,
and a fetching
assortment of
purses, will travel.
Miu Miu bag;miu
miu.com. Acne
Studios dress.

244
 GOOD STUFF
Trusting her Loewe
to contain the chaos,
Ratajkowski takes
It-girl insouciance to
an entirely new
level; loewe.com.
Cartier watch.

245
 SORT IT OUT
The detritus of
contemporary life
seems a lot more
dignified when
carried around in
something from
Bottega Veneta
(bottegaveneta.com),
wouldn’t you say?
All-In top. Michael
Kors Collection skirt.
NESTING
INSTINCT
Ratajkowski lets
things go a little
sideways, toting a
bag from The Row
(therow.com) with
a cheery yellow
pocketbook from
Polo Ralph Lauren
(ralphlauren.com)
tucked inside it.
Ferragamo jacket.
Marni pants.
247
 REMAINS
OF THE DAY
BOTTOM: Hermès
bag; Hermès
boutiques. cenTer:
Loewe shoes.
 FAIR SHAKE
Wielding that
Hermès handbag,
Ratajkowski makes
a joyful mess in
an H&M bodysuit.
Bottega Veneta skirt.
In this story: hair,
Tamara McNaughton;
makeup, Dick
Page. Details, see
In This Issue.
P RO DUC ED BY LEO N E I OA N NOU AT P O N Y P ROJECTS. SE T D ES I G N: CA Z S LAT T ERY.
P HOTOG RA P H ED AT T HE O CU LUS AT WO RL D TRA D E CE N TE R.

249
Island Time
At home in Miami Beach, model
Devyn Garcia, her mom, and her darling little
sister dive headfirst into the season’s
sunniest separates. Photographed by Theo Liu.
FAMILY TIES
Devyn Garcia wears
a Louis Vuitton hat.
OppOsite: Jennie
Pickens, Garcia’s
mother, wears a Dries
Van Noten dress;
driesvannoten.com.
Garcia wears a
Zankov dress;
Bergdorf Goodman.
Fashion Editor:
Jorden Bickham.
 MAIN FEED
Above: Pickens wears Eres (eresparis.com) and
Free People (freepeople.com). Garcia peers
out from the belly of the beast in Gucci sunglasses.
River Covalt, Garcia’s 12-year-old sister, wears
Hunza G (hunzag.com) and Wales Bonner
(walesbonner.net). LeFT: Pickens cracks up at Joe’s
Stone Crab in a Gap tank top and Dolce &
Gabbana pants (select Dolce & Gabbana boutiques).
Garcia wears Zankov; Bergdorf Goodman.

253
STEP IN TIME
Garcia is all but airborne
in a blouse and skirt
from Louis Vuitton;
select Louis Vuitton
boutiques. Proenza
Schouler shoes.
Pickens matches the
kicky mood in a
top and skirt from
Bottega Veneta;
bottegaveneta.com.
Khaite shoes.
255
 FOR THE BIRD
A brilliant pair of
Loewe sunglasses
lights up the dark.

256
 THAT’S A WRAP
Garcia wears a Dolce
& Gabbana swimsuit;
select Dolce &
Gabbana boutiques.
Hermès towel
(worn as skirt) and
bag. In this story:
hair, Charlie Le
Mindu; makeup, Emi
Kaneko. Details,
see In This Issue.
PRO DUC E D BY SE L ECT SE RV I C ES. SE T DESI G N: CA Z S LATT ERY.
PHOTOG RA PH E D AT ESM É M I A MI B E AC H HOT E L.
The Get
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259
 ON HIS TERMS
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 150
theater on steroids—really, really fun.” He has
nothing but praise for Pitt—“a lovely, lovely
person, very collaborative, very nice to act
with, and supersmart”—but working with him
brought Menzies face-to-face with a level of
fame that he doesn’t aspire to. “How does he
go out? It is very constraining to have that level
of visibility.”
Partly from a desire to preserve his anonym-
ity as much as he can, Menzies took an early
decision never to talk about his private life. “Is
that old-fashioned of me?” he asks. “I’m going
to stick to my guns. It’s partly natural shyness on
my part. But to be a bit more grandiose about
it, the idea of celebrity moving into the arts and
acting does have an effect on how we watch.”
Through it all Menzies is genial and engaged,
asking a lot of questions, yet there is something
formal about him too. This is someone who is
deeply serious about acting, pursuing projects
that interest him and then immersing himself
in them. I ask if being able to choose work of
quality and interest is part of this new level of
success, and Menzies says that it has come at a
good time. “The question for me would have
been whether as a younger person I would have
handled it very well,” he tells me. “I just think
at some base level, it has taken me time to get
really good.” He laughs gently. “If I’d had a lot
of exposure early on, I don’t think I’d have been
ready. I know I am a lot better now than I was
10 years ago. Acting keeps you very humble
because you never quite know day-to-day. You
can do all the work in the world and try the
best you can, and sometimes it just lifts off and
sometimes it doesn’t.” *
HISTORY LESSONS
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 213
There’s a TikTok of Strong that’s been
making the rounds. You’ve probably seen it:
A hotel in Milan, 4 a.m., and he and Jessica
Chastain are dancing around in sunglasses to
the Madonna track “Hung Up.” It’s very silly.
And Chastain and Strong know it—they’re
reveling in acting like goofballs, these two thes-
pians we’re accustomed to seeing in “serious”
mode. Like costarring in James Gray’s melan-
choly film Armageddon Time. Or doing Ibsen
adaptations by Amy Herzog. “I was in London
a while ago and these schoolkids started yell-
ing at me—TikTok, TikTok! ” Strong recalls. “I
had no idea what they were talking about—
I don’t do social media, I had no idea I’d gone
viral.” He laughs. Not a belly laugh, more like a
chuckle of bemusement. “What a weird world.
But—hey, new fan base!” Then he turns to me,
pulling down the brim of his baseball cap a little
sheepishly—or, perhaps, shielding himself from
onlookers’ glances of recognition as we stroll the
busy riverfront promenade—and smiles.
Smiling, you see the child in Jeremy
Strong. His default expression—so familiar
to fans of Succession—is a kind of hangdog
look. The writers of that series seem to have
shaped the character of Kendall Roy around
Strong’s capacity to project world-weariness.
260 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM
He invented something new in that role: a
man forever breaking his own heart. Strong
comes across as less haunted than his Succes-
sion princeling, and much, much smarter—a
thinker. Talking to him, you get the sense
that he’s a man continually figuring things
out and for whom every answer only prompts
more questions. This makes him a lively
conversationalist—a keen, sympathetic lis-
tener, quick to probe for deeper meanings, face
hardening into furrowed intensity as he works
through an idea. But then, when Strong smiles,
you see the boy. “Playful,” as Herzog describes
him. “Earnest,” as Gold does. It’s easy to imag-
ine him bringing out that childish aspect of Dr.
Thomas Stockmann—and his woundedness
when people don’t live up to his expectations.
It’s harder—though not impossible—to
imagine Strong in the role he shot before
starting rehearsals for An Enemy of the People.
In The Apprentice, he’ll play Roy Cohn, mid-
century legal titan, master manipulator, and
mentor to Donald Trump (played by Sebastian
Stan). The film, which is still in production
at press time, directed by Ali Abbasi (Holy
Spider), centers on Trump’s rise to notoriety
in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s—a
rise orchestrated, in part, by Cohn. “Trump’s
shadow, his long dark shadow, is itself a shadow
of Cohn,” says Strong. “It’s like he gave him
the playbook: Here’s how you shape the world
in your image. You can say whatever you want,
as long as you say it forcefully enough. Eventu-
ally, people will fall in line behind you.”
Roy Cohn was a man who believed in lies—
as in, he believed you could, by sheer insistence,
make them true. “I guess I’m fascinated by deni-
alism,” Strong replies when I point out that the
characters he inhabits in The Apprentice and
An Enemy of the People seem to be in dialogue.
“Stockmann and Cohn, they’re like inverses of
each other—the guy who gets punished for tell-
ing the truth, and the guy who gets away with
everything.” Until he doesn’t: As Strong points
out, truth eventually caught up with Roy Cohn.
He was disbarred, stripped of his clout—“the
currency that mattered most to him”—and died
in the closet, from a disease, AIDS, that right
up to the end of his life he pretended he didn’t
have. You can only deny facts for so long.
I ask Strong whether it’s taxing to play a
character like Roy Cohn. Strong is well-known
for his immersion, Method-style, in his roles;
he lives inside the skin of his parts, offstage and
between takes. For Kendall Roy, that meant, in
effect, becoming clueless and entitled; playing
yippie activist Jerry Rubin in the Aaron Sor-
kin film The Trial of the Chicago 7, he asked
the crew to spray him with real tear gas, so
he’d know how it felt. As Gold says, Strong is
committed. In taking on Cohn, does he worry
about the character’s toxicity seeping into him?
“I really don’t see it that way. Your task as
an actor is to try to embody someone’s strug-
gle and their needs; you have to understand
the why and how of their actions,” Strong
responds. “You can’t go into the process think-
ing, Wow, this guy’s deplorable, end of story.”
With Stockmann, too, Strong is quick to point
out the character’s layers, beyond his mulish-
ness. He’s warm, he loves his family and is
generous to his friends. He sees himself as a
caretaker, and it’s that identity that fuels his
desperate desire to fix what ails his community.
Ultimately, he’s a tragic figure. But the play isn’t
without hope.
“Anytime you’re adapting an old work, you
have to make choices about what to leave
alone and what to update,” says Gold. “If you
update too much, you lose the resonance—
that sense of, yeah, we’ve been here before. But
you can also look for opportunities to apply a
modern-day perspective.”
“For me, that opportunity is in Stockmann’s
daughter, Petra,” Herzog adds, referring to the
one character in the play who emerges unsul-
lied and underanged. “Frankly, she’s a little
underdeveloped in the original, but Ibsen has
set up this fascinating possibility, this profes-
sional young woman, a schoolteacher, who’s
determined to think for herself. I wanted to
draw her out.” Played on Broadway by Vic-
toria Pedretti, Herzog’s Petra provides the
play’s horizon: The most admirable character
onstage is the one teaching the community’s
young people. Teaching them, you suspect, to
do better. Present-day reality may be a mess,
but there is, thank heavens, a future.
“I’ve got three kids, five and under, so I think
about the climate issue a lot,” says Strong, as we
make our way back toward his home, where
he’ll be spending the rest of the afternoon
playing the part of dad. The house is new,
located on a leafy Brooklyn block, and as the
SAG-AFTRA strike dragged on, Strong had
enjoyed getting to know the neighborhood.
He’s become an expert in the nearby play-
grounds. Now, though, he’s ready to work.
“I need a job, I need a focal point in my life,
I need a challenge,” he tells me. “I like to feel
like I’m walking the plank when I work. Going
back to the theater after all this time, it feels
very dangerous.” Strong’s last theater outing,
The Great God Pan, also by Herzog, was staged
in 2013. In that play, he starred as a man who
comes to suspect he was a victim of childhood
sexual abuse; here, too, Herzog and Strong
were probing into the nature of knowing, of
truth. It’s a rich, combustible theme.
“I think of Stockmann as a guy who’s
somehow wound up with a live grenade in his
hands,” says Strong. “One way or another, it’s
going to blow up. So what do you do?” *
THE MENAGERIE
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 218
over the past 13 years. “The costumes are alter
egos that tell stories,” he explains. (He wears
them and performs at openings—he’s been
a white raven, a chicken, a raccoon, a moth,
among other life forms.) As part of the show,
he painted a large-scale chicken spreading its
wings in flight on the body of an Aeroméxico
Boeing 737. The plane became what he calls
“a political flying chicken,” crossing borders
throughout the Americas without a visa.
In 2011, at Berghain, the famously louche
techno club in Berlin, the artist Álvaro Urbano
danced up to Halilaj and said, “Are you the
chicken guy?” They met again two months
later. Soon after that, they started living
together, along with 12 uncaged and free-
flying canaries. In 2020 they married in a joy-
ous celebration in their studio and home. “It
was the most emotional and beautiful day of
my life,” Halilaj says.
Nine months later, their joint installation
“Forget Me Not,” a spectacle of giant fabric
flowers suspended from a glass dome ceiling,
opened at the National Library of Kosovo in
Pristina. It was timed to coincide with the fifth
annual Pristina Pride Week. All the flowers had
some connection to the artists’ lives, including
an exact replica of the lily that was in their
engagement bouquet. Halilaj has been in the
forefront of the gay rights movement, lobbying
the prime minister of Kosovo for LGBTQIA+
rights, especially the right to marry, in the new
civil code that is being written. “This law is
extremely important to ensure that the whole
society will have the same rights,” Halilaj says,
“and that there is space for everyone to love
and to live.” Once a year, Halilaj and Urbano
travel to a country they’ve never been to before.
They spent Christmas this year in Morocco,
with three days in the desert and no phones,
and then, on the way home, went to Madrid
for New Year’s celebrations with Urbano’s large
Spanish family.
Filipovic, who will soon be the director
of the Kunstmuseum in Basel, has been and
remains one of Halilaj’s most intuitive advo-
cates. “It’s rare to find art (and an artist) that
is at once bitingly critical and unabashedly
hopeful,” she tells me. “He maintains a child-
like wonder without for a moment being naive
about the political forces that incite war, that
divide ethnicities, and that ultimately are
fueled by interests of power.”
On The Met’s roof garden, there can be very
high winds. Halilaj was amused to find in his
contract with the museum a clause specifying
the art should be able to survive hurricanes.
“The stories I deal with in my art come from a
very difficult history, but normally they go to a
safe place in a museum. It’s funny to think that
my sculptures should have to survive hurricanes
at The Met. So sculpturally, metaphorically,
these works that represent very different ethnic
backgrounds, will bend together, supporting
each other, to survive a hurricane.” *
CATCH A FIRE
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 222
An important first step was finding their direc-
tor. Green was still editing King Richard—the
biographical sports drama about Richard,
Venus, and Serena Williams that would win
Will Smith an Oscar in 2022—when he was
approached. Yet upon meeting, he and Ziggy
mostly discussed Stone Cars, a 14-minute short
Green had made on a shoestring budget in
South Africa years earlier. “The fact that that
was what pulled him in made me realize, Oh,
he wants something real,” Green says.
Green was hired in March 2021, and by
February 2022 the movie had its Bob. “I didn’t
know who Kingsley Ben-Adir was. I really
didn’t,” Green says. “I’d heard the name, and
maybe I saw him in something and didn’t
realize I saw him.” But reviewing his tape, “I
was like, Whoa, who’s this guy? He really had
incredible presence, and he did a lot in the
pauses—a lot in the silence.” What he showed
them, Ziggy says, was more dropped-in, more
emotional, “than just a surface interpretation
of Bob Marley.” In the film, Ben-Adir’s Mar-
ley is endlessly kinetic—bouncing on the balls
of his feet as he sings and strums—but also
interior, attempting to reconcile the conflict-
ing demands of his family, his faith, and a
career that was taking him further and further
from home.
Continues Green, “I knew that I was never
going to find Bob Marley. I was never going to
find somebody with his exact voice and exact
look.” But Ben-Adir had the foundation—
and, after reassuring conversations with Rami
Malek and Austin Butler, both of whom had
lately taken on ambitious musical biopics of
their own (Bohemian Rhapsody for Malek,
Elvis for Butler), Green felt confident that
prep (and hair and makeup) would get his star
the rest of the way.
Lynch, known for her exciting recent turns
in No Time to Die, The Woman King, Matilda
the Musical, and The Marvels, joined the cast
as Rita not long thereafter—and without a
moment’s hesitation. Both of Lynch’s parents
had moved to England from Kingston, so for
her, the movie was personal. “When I spoke
to my agent about the project, I thought, All
of my life steps, all of my career steps, have
amounted to this moment,” she tells me.
We’re seated in the vaguely tropical-themed
café at the back of Pier59 Studios in Chelsea,
and despite her jet lag—Lynch had flown in
from London just for the day—her eyes are
bright, her skin glowing. “Even if I was play-
ing a palm tree in the background,” she adds,
“I would need to be connected to this movie.”
Before she’d actually taped, Lynch met with
Green “and I basically threatened him and
said, ‘You need to get it right, even if I’m not
part of it. My whole country will come for
you.’ ” But after a chemistry read with Ben-
Adir, the part was hers.
The preparation started instantly, and went on
for about five months. Ben-Adir slimmed back
down. He listened to Marley’s albums over and
over again, and learned to play the guitar. He
has Caribbean roots—his maternal grandpar-
ents, with whom he was very close, were immi-
grants from Trinidad and Tobago (“Trini to the
bone,” as he puts it), and he was brought along
to Notting Hill Carnival from infancy—but
learning Jamaican patois was a whole ordeal.
With the help of a seven-person dialect team
from Jamaica, specialists from America, and
his own pure grit—over several months, he
painstakingly transcribed phonetically some
50 archival interviews of Marley’s—Ben-Adir
finally reached a point of something close to
fluency. “It’s the most complicated acting task
I’ve ever faced,” he says. Yet by the time he
started shooting, he could understand “every-
thing Bob was saying. So his emotional point
of view, his spiritual point of view, all of the
complexity of the patois that he speaks in—I
knew what he meant.”
While Ben-Adir resists the idea that, as its
leading man, he approached One Love differ-
ently than he would another project—“I feel
like I put the same amount of pressure on
everything that I do,” he says. “I don’t want to
just turn up. I find that quite depressing”—
playing Bob Marley certainly gave him more
to juggle. But he had firm supports in place,
the Marley family chief among them. “I spent
a lot of time talking to them about acting.
Because they’re all musical, they speak the lan-
guage of story and meaning and journey and
feeling,” he says. They were also very present
on set, along with the late Neville Garrick,
Marley’s longtime friend and art director. “It
was nerve-racking,” Ben-Adir says, “but after a
while, seeing them behind the camera became
this beautiful thing, because I could trust that
if anything was off or didn’t feel right, these
Jamaicans, they’re going to say something.” He
laughs. “They’ll tell you straight.”
Lynch was another important resource.
“Days when Lashana was there were always the
best days,” he says. Quickly and wordlessly, she
became a sort of guardian—checking if he’d
eaten, if he’d slept, if he needed water—rather
as Rita had been for Marley, Lynch imagines.
“I feel like I immediately stepped into Rita
when I saw Kingsley’s need on set,” she says.
“Truly, I would grab him by the shoulders and
be like, ‘If you don’t rest today, I’m slapping
you.’” Yet she also admired how completely he’d
steeped himself in the work. “I don’t think I’ve
ever seen or worked with someone so commit-
ted,” she says. “It forced the cast, the supporting
artists, the heads of department, everyone to be
on their A-game.”
A highlight of the four-month shoot, for
everyone involved, was spending time in
Trench Town, the part of Kingston memorial-
ized by Marley in songs like “No Woman, No
Cry,” “Natty Dread,” and “Trenchtown Rock.”
For one thing, there was the chance to engage
with and give back to the community there,
which remains among the poorest in Jamaica.
“Helping locals profit from the making of this
movie, in a way that is going to be substantial
and have a long-term effect—it’s an experience
that people in those types of neighborhoods
hardly get,” says Ziggy. “It was such a special
thing, and that’s one thing I think my father
would’ve been very proud of.”
And Ben-Adir was thrilled to feel so wel-
come there. “You’d spend all day doing a scene,
and then you come back and you’re talking to
all the locals and the neighbors, and then you
end up chilling on someone’s porch, talking
to them for half an hour,” he says. He’d been
prepared for a level of scrutiny, a touch of sus-
picion, from the people for whom Bob Marley
remains a national hero, even more than 40
years after his death. But what he encountered
was just the opposite. “I think they saw the
intensity that I was working at, and I think the
261
 Jamaicans kind of respected it,” Ben-Adir says.
“They were like, This English boy crazy.”
It was a strange thing, when One Love
finally wrapped last April. “I enjoyed the
responsibility—it really makes you feel alive,”
Ben-Adir reflects. “And then afterwards you feel,
Oh, everything’s just slow.” But he can do slow
too—in fact, his body gave him little choice.
After flying from Jamaica to New York, where
he spent a week going to jazz clubs, seeing com-
edy sets, and just wandering around with friends,
Ben-Adir was zapped. “My immune system
crashed. I was in bed for four days in sweats,” he
remembers. “The adrenaline just disappeared.”
Between jobs, at home in east London, he
keeps a very low profile. He does housework,
reads scripts, and listens to podcasts (about
soccer, mostly—Ben-Adir supports Arsenal—
though he also name-checks Steven Bartlett’s
The Diary of a CEO). No social media for him;
he’s too discreet even to share his wife’s name,
though I understand that they are recently
married and don’t have children. Instead, he
chatters happily about his love of long walks
and cold swims. “It’s also how I socialize with
my pals: We all meet at the same place and
swim and sauna and then catch up,” he says.
“When we were young, we used to go out and
drink and get trashed, but now we have more
healthy stuff. We meet to swim and have black
coffee and then go home.”
When we speak, Ben-Adir still seems to be
processing the One Love whirlwind. One senses
he hasn’t quite come down from the high. “It’s
powerful. And privilege doesn’t sum it up, or
honor doesn’t sum it up—it’s like you’ve been
let into this really special, unique legacy, and
you’ve got to share in the private intimacy of
one of the great musicians of all time and his
family. I mean, Jesus Christ.” He erupts into
self-conscious laughter. “Now I’ve said it like
that, it’s kind of stressful.” *
FAMILY TIES
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 229
And honestly, she just got the right people
together.” When Galliano’s Jack Russell terrier
had a litter, Delphine took one of the puppies.
Delphine married Alessandro Vallarino Gan-
cia, the heir to an Italian wine fortune, in 2005,
and Galliano designed her a fairy-tale wedding
dress that took some 1,300 hours to make. “That
was fun,” he remembers. “The fittings were
bonkers—all the in-laws were there, the real
mother, the other mother….” The reception—
for hundreds of guests including politicians,
business leaders, actors, and fashion stars; “the
Mount Olympus of VIPs,” according to Le
Monde—took place at the Château d’Yquem,
owned by Delphine’s father. It was on the cover
and took over 22 pages of Paris Match. The mar-
riage lasted five years.
Delphine wasn’t in charge of Dior in 2011
when Galliano was dismissed after making
antisemitic remarks to strangers, but, as she
recalls, “I was in the room when my father’s assis-
tant came in and said, ‘John’s been arrested by the
police.’ It was a shock. The things he expressed,
the words he said: They weren’t acceptable,” she
says, more in sadness than anger. “It was a very
tough moment for the house. But it’s in moments
like those that one learns a huge amount.”
A year earlier, Delphine had started seeing
her current partner, Xavier Niel. Sometimes
referred to as “the French Steve Jobs,” Niel
is a tech billionaire who founded the telecom
company behind the French internet service
provider Free, and who is also co-owner of Le
Monde. If Delphine is influenced by her father,
her outlook on life is now shared with Niel, a
businessman who did not grow up wealthy and
who is something of a hero in France thanks to
his large-scale gestures in support of new tal-
ent. His business incubator, Station F, is known
as the world’s largest startup facility, and 42 is a
pioneering free computer science school.
Niel, who dropped out of school at 19,
made his first million by the age of 24 in a
colorfully French way: by inventing a sex chat
service for the Minitel, France’s precursor to
the internet. Evan Spiegel, the cofounder and
CEO of Snap, describes him as “an unbeliev-
able friend and mentor to me.” In his early
20s Spiegel would stay in the Arnault-Niels’
pool house when he came to Paris, and when
he went out walking with Niel people would
come up to Niel in the street “to thank him for
what he’d done for France.” Now Spiegel and
his wife, Miranda Kerr—who were introduced
to each other by the couple—have bought a
house next door.
Delphine and Xavier’s daughter, Elisa,
is 11, and their son, Joseph, is 7. (Niel also
has two older sons from a previous relation-
ship.) Becoming a mother puts things into
perspective, Delphine suggests: “Everything
becomes relative.” “She’s an incredibly con-
cerned mother,” Rech had told me of Del-
phine. “I remember how happy she was when
she was pregnant, with her boy. She had a few
weeks where she could not go to her office and
she could go to school, whenever it was the
moment, to pick up Elisa.”
A few years before Galliano’s departure, Del-
phine had befriended another designer. “We
had many secret meetings,” Nicolas Ghesquière
recalls. “It’s quite funny to think about it now—
Paris is very big but also very small.” He was at
Balenciaga, she was deputy managing director
at Dior, but she also played an important role
in the search for talent in the wider group. They
spoke about a job, but Ghesquière wasn’t ready
to move. Even years later, when he was offered
the post as creative director of womenswear at
Vuitton, he said no initially—until he discov-
ered that Delphine would be moving there too.
“And that was the deciding factor for me.” She
has, he says, changed his life.

In This Issue
Table of Contents: 52:
Dinosaur Designs earring;
dinosaurdesigns.com.
Manicurist: Mamie Onishi.
Tailor: Zunyda Watson.
72: On Garcia: minidress;
jwanderson.com. On
Covalt: top; aritzia.com. Pants;
net-a-porter.com. On
Pickens: dress; michaelkors
.com. Manicurist: Donna D.
Tailor: Sew On Set Tailor.
Contributors: 98: Top left
photo: On Covalt: Hunza G
swimsuit; hunzag.com. Wales
Bonner pants; walesbonner
.net. Proenza Schouler shoes;
proenzaschouler.com. Tailor:
Ombra Renzini. On Garcia:
dress; Marni Soho. Proenza
Schouler shoes; proenza
schouler.com. On Pickens:
Eres swimsuit; eresparis
.com. Free People pants; free
people.com. Khaite shoes;
khaite.com. Top right
photo: hair, Akemi Kishida;
makeup, Karin Westerlund.
Manicurist: Eri Narita. Tailor:
Lauryn Trojan. Live at
the Apollo: 115: T-shirt and
pants; commission.nyc.
Tailor: Susie Kourinian. Red
Hot: 120: Bottom photo:
Jacket; select Dolce &
Gabbana boutiques. Fleur du
Mal bra top; fleurdumal
.com. Earring; bulgari.com.
Tailor: Susie Kourinian.
MRS. PRADA
174: Coat, shirts, briefs, and
bag; miumiu.com.
179: Jacket, knit top, skirt,
shorts, belt, and shoes;
prada.com. Manicurist: Eri
Narita. Tailor: Lauryn Trojan.
Tailor for Miuccia Prada:
Ombra Renzini.
STRENGTH IN
NUMBERS
182: Zero + Maria Cornejo
pants; zeromariacornejo
.com. 186–187: Manicurist:
Meri Kohmoto. Tailor: Jen
Hebner at Carol Ai Studio.
188: Gabriela Hearst
pants; gabrielahearst.com.
Sacai bracelet; sacai.jp.
189: On Kebede: shoes from
Dear Frances; dearfrances
.com. Both holding a coat
from The Row; therow.com.
191: Manicurist: Lora
De Sousa. Tailor: Mattia
Akkermans. 192–193:
Manicurist: Mamie Onishi.
Tailor: Zunyda Watson.
195: Éliou ear cuff. 197:
Manicurist: Eri Narita. Tailor:
Lauryn Trojan. 200: On
Kebede: shoes from Dear
Frances; dearfrances.com.
Both holding a jacket from
Stella McCartney; stella
mccartney.com. 201: Éliou
ear cuff. 201–203: Tailor:
Jen Hebner at Carol Ai
Studio. 205: Wales Bonner
(4): Hair, Sondrea “Dre”
Demry-Sanders; makeup,
Yadim Carranza. 207:
Ana Khouri earrings; ana
khouri.com. Manicurist:
Adam Slee. Tailor: Carson
Darling-Blair. For Bibi
Borthwick images:
Manicurist: Adam Slee.
Tailor: Carson Darling-Blair.
HISTORY LESSONS
210: Jacket, sweater,
and pants; loropiana.com.
212–213: On Gold:
sweater; billyreid.com.
Jeans; apc-us.com.
On Herzog: jacket; proenza
schouler.com. Boochier
earrings; twistonline.com.
On Strong: sweater and
pants; loropiana.com.
Grooming for Strong, Amy
Komorowski; hair for Gold
and Herzog, Marin Mullen;
makeup for Gold and
Herzog, Frankie Boyd. Tailor:
Susan Balcunas.
CATCH A FIRE
220–221: On Ben-Adir:
sweater; bottegaveneta
.com. Ferragamo pants;
ferragamo.com. On Lynch:
dress; bottegaveneta.com.
Dinosaur Designs earring;
dinosaurdesigns.com. Cuffs
from Lizzie Fortunato (shop
.lizziefortunato.com) and
Dinosaur Designs (dinosaur

262 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM

 In the early days at Vuitton, they did every-
thing by hand. “You cut out prototypes, work-
shop them, remake new prototypes. I don’t
think people imagine that’s how it’s done,”
Ghesquière says. “Delphine was with me
throughout. We’d be at lunch with the Princess
of Monaco for a Vuitton project on Monday,
and on Tuesday we’d be sitting on the floor of
the studio cutting out prototypes for bags. It
was a really fun time.” Ghesquière remembers
that they would often be in fits of laughter.
Delphine introduced Ghesquière to the
people he’s still working with now—she built
the team not only for the sake of the work,
Ghesquière says, “but with our well-being in
mind too.” It didn’t surprise him at all when
Delphine founded the LVMH Prize 10 years
ago—her gift for talent-spotting and support
was already marked. “It reveals a lot about her—
the way she thinks about the future,” he says.
Much of what Ghesquière came to under-
stand about Delphine he observed from dress-
ing her. For 10 years, she wore his clothes
every day, and told him how she felt in them.
Inspired by her, he “changed a thousand
things: lengths, fluidity of materials, structure.”
Clothes accompany our feelings, he reflects. “If
you’re feeling vulnerable you’re going to pro-
tect yourself a bit, if you feel stronger you’ll
need that less.” He suggests that such an inti-
mate knowledge of this in a CEO will make
an enormous difference—it matters that she
is a woman.
The visitor to Delphine Arnault and Xavier
Niel’s home in the 16th arrondissement of
Paris is greeted by a rounded entrance hall, and
by ground floor rooms with curved edges and
generous floral arrangements, leading to giant
French doors and a garden. The space offers a
kind of instant calm.
One evening last fall, as respectful staff
took my coat, Delphine strode forth from
the living room: warm, commanding, com-
posed. She had been at the office all day but
was now wearing a fluid black suit designed
by Maria Grazia: wide silk velvet trousers
and a velvet-fronted double-breasted jacket,
cinched at the waist but worn with such ease
that it could have been pajamas. In heels she
was architectural, taller than all of her guests
except one: the spirited Ségolène Gallienne,
her best friend since the age of five. The two
of them look practically like twins, and on the
sofa they sat close together, both dressed in
Dior, Ségolène’s hands resting on Delphine’s
knee as they spoke with relaxed intimacy.
Ségolène and Delphine first met because
they had the same swimming instructor in
Saint-Tropez, where they have continued to
spend summers. Ségolène’s father, the late Bel-
gian billionaire Albert Frère, was the co-owner,
with Bernard Arnault, of the Château Cheval
Blanc winery. Friends reminisce about nights
out with the family: Alexandre DJ’ing in night-
clubs, the women fond of tequila shots, Karl
Lagerfeld in tow. “She likes to have a good
time,” Gagosian says of Delphine, admiringly.
Rech fondly points out that Delphine is so dis-
ciplined she’ll be with her personal trainer early
in the morning, no matter how late she’s stayed
out the night before.
While the guests had drinks before dinner,
Elisa—who is tall like her mother—darted in
and out of the living room in jeans and a green
T-shirt. On the walls were works by Cindy
Sherman, Takashi Murakami, and Henry Taylor.
Throughout the house there were metalwork
furniture pieces by the Lalannes, who used to
work for Dior in the days of Saint Laurent.
Sculptures by Frank Gehry and Ugo Rondi-
none stood in the garden. (While the Fonda-
tion Louis Vuitton collects art, Delphine buys
art she wants to live with.)
Mark Bradford, whose monumental paint-
ing of an aerial view of Los Angeles hangs
above the dining table, is a regular visitor to the
house. “It’s very comfortable for me,” he tells
me. Bradford, a defiantly political (and hugely
successful) artist who grew up in South Central
LA, laughs over promising to take Delphine to
a soul food restaurant (“She’ll be totally fine!”),
and says: “She comes from a famous family. But
that doesn’t have anything to do with me and
her sitting around talking. You can see the love
in her family. Some people you see and they feel
like a warm blanket.”
That evening’s 11 guests, who included Eva
Jospin and Jean-Michel Othoniel—artists Del-
phine had collaborated with—a curator, a fur-
niture designer, and the photographer Brigitte
Lacombe, withdrew to the small round dining
room, dimly lit and spectacularly decorated
with an autumnal centerpiece made of purple
calla lilies and russet leaves. The glass plates
were hand-painted with lily of the valley, a
Dior motif. Circumspect servers brought cured
fish, a meltingly good steak, baked apples with
caramel ice cream, and a tower of tiny choco-
lates. The conversation flowed: the exceptional
art exhibitions in Paris, homes in the country,
the last years of Yves Saint Laurent, Lagerfeld’s
insatiable reading habits, the belief that Dior
still mattered because Christian Dior himself
was a benevolent figure—unlike Coco Chanel.
Delphine and her partner looked at each
other indulgently, and there was some gen-
tle teasing across the table. “She’s his biggest
cheerleader. He’s her biggest cheerleader,”
Bradford says of them. In some relationships,
one partner gets all the attention, he observes,
but not in this one: “She smiles when he’s
talking and he smiles when she talks. I think
it’s healthy for the soul. You absolutely see it
in them.”
They both stand in the hallway to say good-
bye, snatches of conversation still floating in
the air as their guests emerge, past the gates
and the guards, into the Paris night. *

designs.com). 4kinship x
Mary Jane Garcia ring;
4kinship.com. 223: Jacket,
CO MPA NI ES ME NT I O NE D I N I TS PAG ES, W E CA NN OT GUA RA N T EE T HE AUTHENTICITY
OF MERCHANDISE SOLD BY DISCOUNTERS. AS IS ALWAYS THE CASE IN PU RCHAS IN G
boutiques. 240–241: Estée Lauder Pure Color ISLAND TIME THE GET
Top, skirt, briefs, and belt; lipstick. Fara Homidi 250: On Garcia: Zankov 258–259: 3. Necklace,
miumiu.com. In the bag: Essential lip and face briefs; zankovstudio.com. $8,550. 6. Ring, $4,480.

shirt, and pants; gucci.com. Michael Kors Collection compacts. Louis Vuitton 251: Hat; select Louis
A WO R D A BOU T DI SCOUN TE RS W HI LE VOGUE TH OROUG HLY R ES EA RC HES TH E

A N I T E M FROM A NYWHE RE OT HE R THAN THE AUTHORIZED STORE, THE BUYER

Manicurist: Mamie.
Tailor: Zunyda Watson.
FAMILY TIES
224–229: Tailor: Jen
Hebner at Carol Ai Studio.
TAKES A RISK AND SHOULD USE CAUTION WHEN DOING SO.
sweater. 242: On the floor:
Dries Van Noten refillable
lipstick. 243: Top, shorts,
and shoe; loewe.com.
244: Dress; acnestudios
.com. Hanging: Alaïa bag;
agenda cover; select
Louis Vuitton boutiques.
Diorshow Iconic Overcurl
Waterproof mascara.
Shoes; loewe.com. 249:
Bag; Hermès boutiques.
Vuitton boutiques. Gabriela
Hearst dress; gabriela
hearst.com. 252–253: Right
photo: On Pickens: Loewe
sunglasses; loewe.com.
On Garcia and Covalt:
LAST LOOK
264: Shoe; Dior boutiques.
266: Shoes; khaite.com.
268: Shoes; brothervellies
.com. 269: Shoes; prada
.com. 272: Shoes; Hermès

NIGHT SHIFT
232–233: Left photo:
On Akech: Irene Neuwirth
earrings; ireneneuwirth
.com. 236–237: Left photo:
Shoes; proenzaschouler
.com. Right photo:
Earrings; (800) 929-DIOR
for information. Tailor:
Susie Kourinian.
MAXIMUM CAPACITY
238–239: Jacket; gucci
.com. Boots; all-in-studio
.com. Cartier watch; Cartier
maison-alaia.com. 245:
All-In boots; all-in-studio
.com. Watch; Cartier
boutiques. In the bag: Gucci
shoes and bag; gucci.com.
246: Top; all-in-studio.com.
Skirt; michaelkors.com.
Loewe shoe; loewe.com.
247: Jacket; ferragamo
.com. Pants; Marni Soho.
Loewe shoes; loewe.com.
In the bag: Louis Vuitton
ping-pong set; select Louis
Vuitton boutiques. Gris
Dior Eau de Parfum. 248:
Clockwise from top left:
Skirt; bottegaveneta.com.
All-In boots; all-in-studio
.com. Louis Vuitton agenda
covers; select Louis Vuitton
boutiques. On the floor,
clockwise from left: Hermès
Plein Air complexion balm.
Fara Homidi Essential lip
compact. Loewe shoes;
loewe.com. Dries Van Noten
refillable lipstick. Aerin Rose
de Grasse Joyful Bloom
solid perfume. Manicurist:
Manicure by Elle Gerstein
using Chanel Le Vernis.
Tailor: Hailey Desjardins.
Gucci sunglasses; gucci boutiques. 274: Shoe;
.com. 254–255: On Garcia: select Chanel boutiques.
Gucci sunglasses; gucci
.com. Shoes; proenza
CONDÉ NAST IS COMMITTED TO
schouler.com. On Pickens: GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL
Gucci sunglasses; gucci SUSTAINABILITY. SCAN HERE
FOR DETAILS.
.com. Khaite shoes;
khaite.com. 256: Loewe
sunglasses; loewe.com.
257: Loewe sunglasses;
loewe.com. Towel and bag;
Hermès boutiques.
Proenza Schouler shoes;
proenzaschouler.com.
Manicurist: Donna D.
Tailor: Sew On Set Tailor.

263
Last Look

Dior
PRO P ST YLI ST: LU NE KUI PE RS.

Ring, ring! Spring is calling, and the message is clear: Ballet-inspired flats—with each of those
seen here from houses headed by women—are the shoe silhouette of the season. Let’s start
with Dior: The squarish toe box of its silk satin slippers winks at ballet pointe shoes, while the pearl
dangle—like the C and D monograms adorning the straps—is there purely for the fashion
of it all. Want to really walk the ballet walk? Crisscross them up your ankles for an entrechat.
P H OTO G RA P H E D BY L A RA G I L I B E RTO

264 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM

H&M STUDIO S/S 2024

BLAZER
$249 USD

LAUNCHING FEBRUARY 29 IN SELECT STORES AND AT HM.COM

Last Look

Khaite
To be fully transparent: You need a pair of mesh shoes—that is, if you haven’t
already taken the chic plunge. Khaite’s version, featuring meadowy
3D embroideries of lily buds in snow white and royal purple, is splendidly
suited for spring—clearly the perfect way to step into the new season.
P H OTO G RA P H E D BY P EY TO N F U L FO R D

266 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM

H&M STUDIO S/S 2024

COAT
$369 USD

LAUNCHING FEBRUARY 29 IN SELECT STORES AND AT HM.COM

Last Look

Brother Vellies
Brother Vellies founder Aurora James calls these the Picnic
Shoe. The Mary Jane flat with a heart-shaped Swarovski crystal
buckle has a cheery Pepto-pink hue derived from natural dyes.
As for the name: It’s inspired by the shoes James herself
wore as a teenager during strolls and picnics in her local park.
They’re for daydreaming—either in them, or about them.
P H OTO G RA P H E D BY O L I V I A GA L L I

268 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM

 Prada
Prada’s sumptuously boxy satin slides—with the sort of hip-to-be-square
toe that could very well be a thesis of the house’s design ethos—are
rendered in a fiery tangerine color that’s become a bit of a recent tonal
signature. ’Tis the season, apparently, for right angles to just feel so right.
P H O T O G R A P H E D B Y D E L A L I AY I V I

VOGUE.COM MARCH 2024 269

H&M STUDIO

SHORTS
$249 USD

LAUNCHING FEBRUARY 29 IN SELECT STORES AND AT HM.COM

 S/S 2024

JEANS
$99 USD
Last Look

Hermès
Whether you’ve been adoring your Kelly or merely clamoring for one, get ready for a
new object of affection: the Kelly slingback. Handcrafted with goatskin leather, the flat
features two buckles: an adjustable one on the ankle strap (function) and one at the toe
(form), where a palladium-plated oversized Kelly bag buckle finishes things off with grace.
P H OTO G RA P H E D BY C L É M E N C E E L M A N

272 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM

H&M STUDIO S/S 2024

SKIRT
$99 USD

LAUNCHING FEBRUARY 29 IN SELECT STORES AND AT HM.COM

Last Look

Chanel
Chanel’s spring-summer 2024 runway featured several models deploying these
brilliantly embellished ballet flat slingbacks. On a bed of white lambskin, an
embroidered smattering of strass crystals in various shapes and sizes envelops
everything—while topping it all off is a neat black bow with a miniature
double-C logo. Wherever you’re headed, they’re a step in the right direction.
P H OTO G RA P H E D BY JAC K I E KU RS E L

274 MARCH 2024 VOGUE.COM

H&M STUDIO S/S 2024

DRESS
$129 USD

LAUNCHING FEBRUARY 29 IN SELECT STORES AND AT HM.COM